Proust, Class, and Nation

Edward J. Hughes

Explores Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu in relation to the socio-political context of Third Republic France, thereby illuminating the ideological positions of Proust's day on issues to do with the class structure and social mobility, national identity, and the role of the writer
Provides a new understanding of social class in the early twentieth century and the link between nation and literature as depicted in the work of this major European writer
Corrects an important imbalance in Proust studies by giving prominence to the depiction of working-class culture in Proust

Proust, Class, and Nation

Edward J. Hughes

Description

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.

Proust, Class, and Nation

Edward J. Hughes

Abbreviations
Introduction
1:On the nation and its culture
2:Contexts for class
3:'Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe'
4:Balbec: a new sociality
5:Frames, language, judgements
6:Masters, laws, and servants
7:Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé
8:Claims and complaints
9:Postscript
Bibliography
Index

Proust, Class, and Nation

Edward J. Hughes

Author Information

Edward J. Hughes, Professor of French, Queen Mary, University of London

Edward J. Hughes studied Modern Languages at Queen's University, Belfast in the 1970s and has taught in the University of London since 1980. He is currently Professor of French in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary, University of London. He has lectured on Proust and other modern French authors in Britain, Ireland, France, Holland, and the United States and served as President of the Society for French Studies between 2008 and 2010. His research focusses principally on socio-political and cultural readings of modern French literature.

Proust, Class, and Nation

Edward J. Hughes

Reviews and Awards

Shortlisted for the Enid McCleod Book Prize 2011

"Hughess impressive scholarship and meticulous textual documentation illustrates Proust as a strong politically motivated artist and philosopher." - Hans G. Despain, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books