placed, set.

However, if purely aesthetic questions were at stake, questions of love and alcoholism would not be so paramount to this study of Durrell and Lowry--despite the obvious fact that these themes are paramount to the novels themselves. Both writers deserve unflinching attention to their style, yet their themes touch upon aspects of the human condition which itself must be treated aesthetically--arguments as to why writing or making love under the influence (of alcohol and thoughts of another, respectively) continue to simultaneously draw out the worst and best of the subjectivity presently at risk. For I hesitate to refer to the persons of Lowry and Durrell: the impression their authorship makes of their personality is favorably hazy, such is the achievement of their art that regardless of how autobiographical it appears, always present is the distance that reminds the reader of that troublesome notion, the autonomy of art, its blameless separate sphere that is most blameworthy in the eyes of political-minded critics (e.g. Terry Eagleton).