Albert Camus: A Very Short Introduction

Description

Albert Camus is one of the best known philosophers of the twentieth century, as well as a widely read novelist. This book contextualises Camus in his troubled and conflicted times, and analyses the enduring popularity of his major philosophical and literary works in connection with contemporary political, social, and cultural issues.

• Explores the life and work of Albert Camus, major cultural icon of the twentieth century
• Offers a comprehensive view of Camus' major works and interventions including his notion of the absurd and revolt
• Analyses the enduring popularity of Camus in connection with contemporary political, social, and cultural issues
• Part of the Very Short Introduction Series - over ten million copies sold worldwide

About the Author(s)

Oliver Gloag, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of North Carolina, Asheville

Oliver Gloag is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literature at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. He was educated at Columbia University, Tulane University (J.D.), and Duke University (Ph.D.); he specializes in francophone and postcolonial literature, twentieth century French literature, and cultural history. He has published on Sartre and Camus and contributed to The Sartrean Mind (Routledge). He is the author of a forthcoming book on the ideological and political claiming of Camus in contemporary France (La fabrique).

Table of Contents

Preface
1:Camus, son of France in Algeria
2:Camus, from reporter to editorialist
3:Camus and the absurd
4:Rebel without a cause
5:Camus and Sartre — the breaks that made them inseparable
6:Camus and Algeria
7:Camus' legacies
Further reading
Index

Reviews

"Oliver Gloag presents Camus without apologies. The reader must come to terms with the paradox of the colonizer's unreasonable love of "home", his controversial sexual politics, and his luminous prose of anguish and integrity." - Professor Gayatri Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

"An admirably concise but penetrating analysis of unresolved conflicts between Camus' humanism and his attachment to French Algeria as the key to his writing." - Robert O. Paxton, Emeritus Professor at Columbia University