This book offers a socio-historical reinterpretation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Breaking with recent trends in Proust criticism, Michael Sprinker draws on historical scholarship to assess Proust's portrait of French society, and shows that the novel's account of its class structure and rivalries was both precise and critically engaged. He argues that in other areas, notably the nature of nationalist sentiment and gender ideology, Proust offers insight into phenomena studied only in fragmentary ways in previous historical writing on this crucial period.

The past decade has witnessed much research and writing on the cultural legacies of European imperialism. This collection of essays is a work of criticism on the cultures of imperialism. Fundamental to the editors' conceptualization is the premise that while colonialism may be a thing of the past for the majority of the world's people, its legacies in political, economic and ideological structures continue to shape the world. Ranging in space and time, from late-Victorian Britain and Ireland to the post-war US and Latin America, these essays map crucial regions in the terrain of cultural...

On his death in October 1990, Louis Althusser remained one of the most controversial of the master thinkers to emerge from the Parisian intellectual scene of the 1960s.

This book sets out to clarify the nature of the aesthetic as a category within the theory of historical materialism. It opens with an analysis of Marx's brief discussion of Greek art in the Grundrisse, moves through a series of readings of specifically bourgeois texts, including those of Ruskin, G.M. Hopkins, Nietzsche and Henry James, and then to the terrain of Marxism in the concepts of history underwriting the work of Fredric Jameson and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sprinkler detours through the recent works of Perry Anderson to set the stage for a systematic consideration of the theoretical...