ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on selected dynamics of exile and landscape in order to explore powerful narratives of belonging and exclusion in which Egypt is constructed as an exile of the imagination. To date, critics have reflected upon the enduring potency of the Egyptian landscape –– the ‘lure of Egypt’ –– as the site for the construction of ‘mythical pasts and imagined homelands’. The landscape of Alexandria evokes a host of histories and mythologies. These have exerted a powerful hold on the western imagination, as part of, but distinct from the rest of Egypt. Modern Alexandria, meanwhile, with its relative poverty of ancient material culture, has been distinguished as a site of nostalgia and loss. The investment in contemporary Greece was intense during the period of the poets’ exile. The wounded exiled writers empathized with Greece, itself now a wounded culture as a result of occupation by Fascist forces.
