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.
For...

This textbook series is ambitious in scope. It provides concise and lucid introductions to major works of world literature from classical antiquity to the twentieth century. It is not confined to any single literary tradition or genre, and will cumulatively form a substantial library of textbooks on some of the most important and widely read literary masterpieces. Each book is devoted to a single work and provides a close reading of that text, as well as a full account of its historical, cultural, and intellectual background, a discussion of its influence, and a guide to further reading. The...

John Sturrock's classic explication of Structuralism represents the most succinct and balanced survey available of a major critical movement associated with the thought of such key figures as Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan and Althusser theory.

• A classic work in literary and cultural theory.
  
• Reissued to coincide with calls for a return to structuralism.
  
• Includes a new introduction by Jean-Michel Rabate, which explores developments in the reception of structuralist theory in the past five to ten years.

John Sturrock's classic explication of Structuralism represents the most succinct and balanced survey available of a major critical movement associated with the thought of such key figures as Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan and Althusser theory.

• A classic work in literary and cultural theory.
  
• Reissued to coincide with calls for a return to structuralism.
  
• Includes a new introduction by Jean-Michel Rabate, which explores developments in the reception of structuralist theory in the past five to ten years.

The Life of Henry Brulard is the autobiography of one of France's greatest writers, Stendhal, author of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. Here, writing at white heat and with such ferocious honesty and indignation that his book was to remain unpublishable for more than a century after its composition, Stendhal revisits his unhappy childhood in a stuffy provincial town and bares his rebellious heart. His adored mother, who died when he was only seven; a father devoted only to his own social ambitions; the aunt whose daily cruelties passed for care: these...

With the aim of widening the scope of Marxist theory, Henri Lefebvre finished Dialectical Materialism just before the beginning of World War II and the Resistance movement against the Vichy regime. As the culmination of Lefebvre's interwar activities, the book highlights the tension-fraught relationship between Lefebvre and the French Communist Party (PCF). For Lefebvre, unlike for the PCF, Marxism was above all a dynamic movement of theory and practice. Dialectical Materialism is an implicit response to Joseph Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism and an...

A major study of the western tradition of literary autobiography, from Augustine to Sartre.

In this accessible guide to the literature and thought of 20th century France, Sturrock clarifies the various intellectual movements that have marked the recent history of French writing, including Existentialism, Structuralism and the OuLiPo.