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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 February 2020
The celebrated conservationist, and serial memoirist, Gerald Durrell often imaginatively revisited the Corfu of his childhood. Donkeys were integral to his vision of Greek rural life. Both the setting and the style of his literary output resisted what he regarded as unwelcome modernization. His 1968 publication The Donkey Rustlers, one of his few novels, shows how Durrell attempted to perpetuate an outdated view of both Greece and children's literature. It is argued that Durrell's well-attested affection for the Greek people was not well reflected by a narrative in which both foreign children and donkeys seem to come out on top.
My thanks to Janne White, Toni Wolstenholme and their colleagues at the Jersey Archive for facilitating access to Gerald Durrell's papers. Professor Garry Marvin first made me aware of the existence of the academic field of human-animal studies.
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67 Durrell, The Donkey Rustlers, 19.
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75 Op. cit., 66, 78.
76 Op. cit., 70–1, 75, 122.
77 Op. cit., 81–2.
78 Op. cit., 121.
79 Op. cit., 136, 143.
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84 Op. cit., 35, 43, 86.
85 Op. cit., 53, 55.
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87 Op. cit., 108.
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89 Op. cit., 133.
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