The first volume of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, in Lydia Davis's award-winning translation

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English. Now, Penguin Classics brings Proust's masterpiece to new audiences throughout the world, beginning with Lydia Davis's internationally acclaimed translation of the first volume, Swann's...

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is Proust s spectacular dissection of male and female adolescence, charged with the narrator s memories of Paris and the Normandy seaside. At the heart of the story lie his relationships with his grandmother and with the Swann family. As a meditation on different forms of love, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower has no equal. Here, Proust introduces some of his greatest comic inventions, from the magnificently dull M. de Norpois to the enchanting Robert de Saint-Loup. It is memorable as well for the first appearance of the two figures...

Sodom and Gomorrah now in a superb translation by John Sturrock takes up the theme of homosexual love, male and female, and dwells on how destructive sexual jealousy can be for those who suffer it. Proust s novel is also an unforgiving analysis of both the decadent high society of Paris and the rise of a philistine bourgeoisie that is on the way to supplanting it. Characters who had lesser roles in earlier volumes now reappear in a different light and take center stage, notably Albertine, with whom the narrator believes he is in love, and the insanely haughty Baron de Charlus.
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Focusing on a moment and a source in nineteenth-century France, Christopher Prendergast takes up a big question that is still with us: What is a classic? The question is, by virtue of its insistent recurrence, itself a classic question. It returns to haunt us. It provided the title of a text for French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1850 ("Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?"), as it did in the twentieth century for T.S. Eliot and John Coetzee. Centring on Sainte-Beuve in his nineteenth-century context, Prendergast's inquiry takes us historically to many places (antiquity, the middle ages,...

Moving deftly among literary and visual arts, as well as the modern critical canon, Christopher Prendergast's book explores the meaning and value of representation as both a philosophical challenge (What does it mean to create an image that "stands for" something absent?) and a political issue (Who has the right to represent whom?).

The Triangle of Representation raises a range of theoretical, historical, and aesthetic questions, and offers subtle readings of such cultural critics as Raymond Williams, Paul de Man, Edward Said, Walter Benjamin, and Helene Cixous, in addition to...

Presenting a new approach to the study of nineteenth-century French poetry, each essay in this collection focuses on the detailed organization of a single poem. Eleven essays, written from a wide range of critical and theoretical viewpoints, cover poets from Lamartine to Mallarme and Laforgue. The method of close reading has been adopted in order to effect an introduction to the analysis of the "basics" of poetic language (sound, meter, syntax, etc.) and in order to explore and illustrate some of the claims and arguments about poetry arising from developments in modern literary theory....

From the author of "The Order of Mimesis" and "Paris and the Nineteenth-Century", this book provides a collection of essays on Raymond William's theories of cultural materialism.

With particular reference to nineteenth-century French culture, the contributors explore the role realism has played in the social construction of gender and sexuality. Among their subjects are nineteenth-century physiologies, photographs, caricatures, and Balzac's Comedie humaine; the ethnographic claims of the Goncourts' naturalism and the historical claims of Zola's; and the allure of exotica displayed at new museums and international expositions.

In the continuing debates about the cultural dimensions of globalization the question of literature has been something of a poor relation. This volume seeks to redress the balance, with a starting point of Goethe's idea of Weltliteratur, from which it travels out to various parts of the globe at different historical junctures. The book's concerns include the legacy of Goethe's idea; variable understandings of the term literature itself; cross-cultural encounters (the contact of the oral and the written, the paradoxes of exoticism); the nature of small literatures and the cultural politics of...

EugEne Sue (1804-57), like his contemporary Alexandre Dumas pEre, was one of the most successful writers of his time. Les MystEres de Paris, the novel for which he is most remembered, became a publishing sensation. In its serial form, it took the public by storm -- readers fought for copies of the next instalment -- and in book form its print-run reached an unprecedented 60,000. Christopher Prendergast's study engages with the problematic of emerging forms of popular literature on the basis of a specific hypothesis: that Les MystEres de Paris, written and published in serial form, was,...