Writing in the Margins sparkles with fresh insights into a group of writers for whom life and art were intricately interwoven. Marilyn Papayanis investigates the "ex-centric" expatriate--a metropolitan figure whose search for the good life leads him away from the industrial West to marginalized or colonized domains. For the principal subjects of her study--D. H. Lawrence, Paul Bowles, and Lawrence Durrell--expatriation was a defining act, shaping not only their personal histories but their work as well. Whether exploring the expatriate's experience of Italy through Lawrence's Aaron's Rod and The Lost Girl, Bowles's representation of the relationship between self and Other in The Sheltering Sky and The Spider's House, or Durrell's ambivalent rendering of art and politics in The Alexandria Quartet, Papayanis shows that these writers' concerns were not only aesthetic but ethical, that facing the question "How should I live?" led invariably to a rejection of life in modern industrial society. Papayanis acknowledges that postcolonial theory has tended to discredit the endeavors of such metropolitan expatriates, but she argues that the desire to "decenter" oneself, as these writers sought to do, is not necessarily a dishonorable one and that certain expatriate narratives actually interrogate the mythologies and modes of thought that inspire them. In her closing chapter, the author considers two more recent novels--Don DeLillo's The Names and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient--as postmodern revisions of the concerns and ethical preoccupations of the earlier expatriate texts.

She contends that while the older, modernist expatriates pursue a doomed quest for personal redemption, languishingor dying on the periphery, the postmodern expatriates are driven home once their unwitting complicity in the projects of imperialism and genocide is revealed.