Albert Camus is one of the iconic figures of twentieth-century French literature, one of France??'s most widely read modern literary authors and one of the youngest winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. As the author of L???Etranger and the architect of the notion of ???the Absurd??? in the 1940s, he shot to prominence in France and beyond. His work nevertheless attracted hostility as well as acclaim and he was increasingly drawn into bitter political controversies, especially the issue of France??'s place and role in the country of his birth, Algeria. Most recently, postcolonial studies have identified in his writings a set of preoccupations ripe for revisitation. Situating Camus in his cultural and historical context, this Companion explores his best-selling novels, his ambiguous engagement with philosophy, his theatre, his increasingly high-profile work as a journalist and his reflection on ethical and political questions that continue to concern readers today.

Proust's work may sometimes offer a picture of intellectual confidence. But not enough had previously been said about the crisis of hypersensitivity in many of Proust's characters. This 1983 book attempted to fill that gap, and as such should interest all students of Proust. In A la recherche, Proust deliberates on the separation between the troubled artist and the simple, sometimes primitive sensibility of others. It is a separation that many critics have viewed as inevitable. In this book, however, Dr Hughes shows that Proust is constantly exploring the divide, and finally succeeds in harmonising simplicity and complexity - in the unlikely form of music. In this way, several areas of Proust's novel are brought into prominence that would usually have been ignored - for example, his nostalgic depictions of animal life. This book provides a synthesis of these and related experiences: as such it offers a reappraisal of Proust's view of human awareness.

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 France's 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 West's marginalization of cultural difference.

Hughes explores how cultural centers require the peripheral, the outlawed, and the deviant in order to define and bolster themselves. He analyzes the hierarchies of cultural value that inform the work of six modern French writers: the exoticist Pierre Loti; Paul Gauguin, whose Noa Noa enacts European fantasies about Polynesia; Proust, who analyzes such exemplary figures of exclusion and inclusion as the homosexual and the xenophobe; Montherlant; Camus, who pleads an alienating detachment from the cultures of both metropolitan France and Algeria; and Jean Genet.

Albert Camus is one of the iconic figures of twentieth-century French literature, one of France??'s most widely read modern literary authors and one of the youngest winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. As the author of L???Etranger and the architect of the notion of ???the Absurd??? in the 1940s, he shot to prominence in France and beyond. His work nevertheless attracted hostility as well as acclaim and he was increasingly drawn into bitter political controversies, especially the issue of France??'s place and role in the country of his birth, Algeria. Most recently, postcolonial studies have identified in his writings a set of preoccupations ripe for revisitation. Situating Camus in his cultural and historical context, this Companion explores his best-selling novels, his ambiguous engagement with philosophy, his theatre, his increasingly high-profile work as a journalist and his reflection on ethical and political questions that continue to concern readers today.

Writing in 1927, Julien Benda described France as being afflicted by the twin scourges of narrow, class-based politics and rabid nationalism. He nevertheless identified Marcel Proust (who had died in 1922) as a writer who had refused to embrace the ideological narrowness of his age. Edward J. Hughes seeks to assess how Proust and his novel A la recherche du temps perdu might be understood in relation to issues of class and nation. A la recherche was produced in momentous times. As an extended textual construction, first conceived of in 1908 and the last tranche of which appeared posthumously almost two decades later, it was assembled against a backdrop of major historical events: pre-war tensions in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair and the Separation of Church and State (issues on which Proust had campaigned publicly); the First World War and the atmosphere of narrow nationalism and Germanophobia which the conflict generated; and the continuing polarization in class politics in the years after the First World War. These all find echoes in A la recherche and Hughes establishes how the exposure given to questions of class and nation needs to be understood historically. He demonstrates that the frequently entrenched positions of Proust's contemporaries at times square with the language and images of social conservativism to be found in A la recherche. Yet alongside that, Hughes unearths evidence that points to Proust as a free-floating, often playful, iconoclast and radical commentator who, as Theodor Adorno observed, resisted bourgeois compartmentalization.

The formulation 'egalitarian strangeness' is a direct borrowing from Courts voyages au pays du peuple [Short Voyages to the Land of the People] (1990), a collection of essays by the contemporary French thinker Jacques Ranciere. Perhaps best known for his theory of radical equality as set out in Le Maitre ignorant [The Ignorant Schoolmaster] (1987), Ranciere reflects on ways in which a hierarchical social order based on inequality can come to be unsettled. In the democracy of literature, for example, he argues that words and sentences serve to capture any life and to make it available to any reader. The present book explores embedded forms of social and cultural 'apportionment' in a range of modern and contemporary French texts (including prose fiction, socially engaged commentary, and autobiography), while also identifying scenes of class disturbance and egalitarian encounter. Part One considers the 'refrain of class' audible in works by Claude Simon, Charles Peguy, Marie Ndiaye, Thierry Beinstingel, and Gabriel Gauny and examines how these authors' practices of language connect with that refrain. In Part Two, Hughes analyses forms of domination and dressage with reference to Simone Weil's mid-1930s factory journal, Paul Nizan's novel of class alienation Antoine Bloye from the same decade, and Pierre Michon's Vies minuscules [Small Lives] (1984) with its focus on obscure rural lives. The reflection on how these narratives draw into contiguity antagonistic identities is extended in Part Three, where individual chapters on Proust and the contemporary authors Francois Bon and Didier Eribon demonstrate ways in which enduring forms of cultural distribution are both consolidated and contested.

One of France's most high-profile writers, Albert Camus experienced both public adulation and acrimonious rejection in a career cut short by a fatal car accident in 1960. From humble origins in a European family living in colonial Algeria, Camus established himself as a successful novelist, with best-selling titles such as The Outsider and The Plague coming to be translated into scores of languages and earning him a reputation as a figure who captured the mood of the age. It was a world dominated, he reflected ruefully, by war and violence. The Liberation of France towards the end of the Second World War saw him emerge as one of the country's most prominent journalists at the newspaper Combat. But his subsequent position-taking on the Cold War in which, not unlike Orwell, he distanced himself from those sympathetic to the Soviet Union left him adrift from many on the Left in post-war metropolitan France. The worsening conflict in his native Algeria in the mid to late 1950s accentuated his sense of alienation as voices within France increasingly called into question the country's role in North Africa. Camus reflected on 'all the errors, contradictions and hesitations' that had marked his involvement with Algeria but he remained viscerally linked to the place of his birth. Edward J. Hughes analyses the life of an author whose work and position-taking were the subject of both intense interest and scrutiny. 'I do not guide anyone', he was to plead in his last interview, thereby reinforcing the paradox of a leading figure who in private wrestled with the challenge of pursuing his craft as a writer in an age of pressing ideological conflict.

For those who have discovered his books, in particular The Meaning and End of Religion, published in 1963 but overshadowed by the furore surrounding Honest to God, which appeared in the same year, Wilfred Cantwell Smith is one of the most important and attractive figures on the contemporary theological scene. Challenging assumptions about the nature of religion, and concerned always with the nature of authentic faith in the modern world, he has helped those who have read him to look on both Christianity and Islam, the two main areas of his study, with new eyes, and helped to deepen personal faith by showing what it is. Yet his name is still largely unknown, and his thinking has not made the impact it should have done. Part of the reason for this is the inaccessibility of his work. Much of it has only been published in specialist journals, or in books with limited circulations, by American university presses. Yet the issues with which he deals are vital for a world with many religions and multi-cultural societies, and his analyses and proposals are always refreshingly positive and constructive. Here Dr Hughes gives the first systematic account of the main themes in Dr Cantwell Smith's thought: the nature of faith and how it differs from belief, the nature of truth in theology, how adherents of different religions can understand one another and the possibilities for a world theology. The book ends with suggestions about the changes which are needed in attitudes and institutions if truth is to be served better in thought and life than is currently the case. With a Preface by John Hick.