Alexandria, Real and Imagined (Publications for the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King's College, London)

(Hardcover)-Alexandria, Real and Imagined offers a portrait of an extraordinary city: Alexandria - as seen through the eyes of its inhabitants and by outsiders, from the time of its foundation in the 4th century BC up to the 20th century. As the capital of a Hellenistic kingdom, then as a major city in the Roman, Byzantine and Arab empires, Alexandria was renowned as an intellectual and artistic centre, and famed for its library. Alexandria was also a vital commercial centre and a cosmopolitan city, and the essays included in this volume examine religious and cultural interactions, and examine how it appeared to visitors through the Middle Ages. The cosmopolitan aspect of the city was brought to an end with the Egyptian revolution of the 1950s, but the myth created in the works of Cavafy and Durrell, amongst others, is treated in several contributions, contrasting with others exploring the images of Alexandria in modern Egyptian Arabic novels, and the realities of life there over the past 150 years.