Edward J. Hughes

Writing marginality in modern French literature : from Loti to Genet

Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature, first published in 2001, explores how cultural centres require the peripheral, the outlawed and the deviant in order to define and bolster themselves. It analyses the hierarchies of cultural value which inform the work of six modern French writers: the exoticist Pierre Loti; Paul Gauguin, whose Noa Noa enacts European fantasies about Polynesia; Proust, who analyses such exemplary figures of exclusion and inclusion as the homosexual and the xenophobe; Montherlant, who claims to subvert colonialist values in La Rose de sable; Camus, who pleads an alienating detachment from the cultures of both metropolitan France and Algeria; and Jean Genet. Crucially Genet, who was typecast as Frances moral pariah, in charting Palestinian statelessness in his last work, Un Captif amoureux (1986), reflects ethically on the dispossession of the Other and the violence inherent in the Wests marginalization of cultural difference.

Proust among the Stars

For many, Proust is the supreme European writer of the twentieth century. This book tackles his achievement head-on. Art, death, sex, politics, loss, guilt, morality-Prousts major themes are revealed and explained here. Proust Among the Stars is a matchless close reading of Remembrance of Things Past and a lesson in how to read the great books profitably and pleasurably. Malcolm Bowie asserts that Prousts novel is one of the great exercises in speculative imagining in the worlds literature; and that its originality lies first in the quality of Prousts textual invention, page after page, line after line. Prousts world constantly shimmers with a sense of multiple possibilities and is at the same time infused with the urge to order, obsessively to organize. Bowie examines how Proust achieves this in his writing, as opposed to his themes, plots, or theories. An original, beautiful, and deeply moving book, Proust Among the Stars shows how Prousts work deepens our understanding of our lives and ourselves.

Proust@@@Marcel Proust: A Study in the Quality of Awareness

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Preliminary notes Introduction 1. Prousts early work 2. Beteween Jean Santeuil and A la recherche 3. The narrators childhood and adolescence: formative influences 4. Characterisation: the functioning of a law of opposites 5. Albertine as captive of the narrator 6. The realisation of an artistic vocation Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index.