Cyprus and the Not-So-Soft Power of Cultural Politics: Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons and Rodis Roufos' The Age of Bronze

This article builds on postcolonial readings of Lawrence Durrell's work and offers a comparative analysis of Bitter Lemons and the 1960 novel The Age of Bronze by Rodis Roufos, a Greek diplomat and journalist, who wrote it in direct response to Durrell's text. My main objective is to show that any critical analysis of Durrell's work on Cyprus should take into account both the literary and political criticism that the work incited among the non-British, non-Anglophone intellectual circles of the time as well as the specific cultural political power dynamics that have allowed Durrell's work to dominate as the uncontested, monologic authority on the subject of Cyprus' decolonization. By presenting an extensive, in-depth textual analysis of a suppressed section of Roufos' novel, first published by David Roessel in 1994, my paper aims to demonstrate that beyond the veneer of its overwhelmingly positive reception, Bitter Lemons was in fact the subject of cross-cultural, international debate that bears testament to the capacity of cultural objects to shape political realities. Interpreting both texts as examples of cultural politics, the article also illustrates the powerful legacy of colonization in current European political discourse.