European Literature

This work examines the philosophy of history and the subject of the nation in the literature of Joseph Conrad. It explores the importance of nineteenth-century Polish Romantic philosophy in Conrad's literary development, arguing that the Polish response to Hegelian traditions of historiography in nineteenth-century Europe influenced Conrad's interpretation of history. After investigating Conrad's early career in the context of the philosophy of history, the book analyses Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911) in light of Conrad's writing about Poland and his sustained interest in the subject of national identity. These novels treat the question of the nation and history, with Conrad juxtaposing his belief in an inherited Polish national identity, derived from Herder and Rousseau, with a sceptical questioning of modern nationalism in European and Latin American contexts. Nostromo presents the creation of the modern nation state of Sulaco; The Secret Agent explores the subject of ‘foreigners’ and nationality in England; while Under Western Eyes constitutes a systematic attempt to undermine Russian national identity. Conrad emerges as an author who examines critically the forces of nationalism and national identity that troubled Europe throughout the nineteenth century and in the period before the First World War. This leads to a consideration of Conrad's work during the Great War. In his fiction and newspaper articles, Conrad found a way of dealing with a conflict that made him acutely aware of being sidelined at a turning point in both modern Polish and modern European history. Finally, this book re-evaluates Conrad's late novels The Rover (1923) and Suspense (1925), a long-neglected part of his career, investigating Conrad's sustained treatment of French history in his last years alongside his life-long fascination with the cult of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Supported by an enduring critical paradigm, the traditional account of Conrad's career privileges his public image as man of the sea, addressing himself to a male audience and male concerns. This book challenges received assumptions by recovering Conrad's relationship to women not only in his life but in his fiction and among his readers. The existing interplay of criticism, biography, and marketing has contributed to a masculinist image associated with a narrow body of modernist texts. Instead, this book reinstates the female influences arising from his early Polish life and culture; his friendship with the French writer Marguerite Poradowska; his engagement with popular women's writing; and his experimentation with visuality as his later works appear in the visual contexts of women's pages of popular journals. By foregrounding less familiar novels such as Chance (1913) and the neglected Suspense (unfinished and published posthumously, 1925), the book emphasizes the range and continuity of Conrad's concerns, showing that his later discussions of gender and genre often originate in the period of the great sea tales. Conrad also emerges as an acute reader and critic of popular forms, while his unexpected entry into important contemporary debates about female identity invites us to rethink the nature of his contribution to modernism.

The turn of the millennium in France coincided with a number of tangible crises and apocalyptic discourses, with the growth of the mass media and global market, further generating and manipulating crisis. This book contextualizes and studies the work of four influential writers of prose fiction—Angot, Echenoz, Houellebecq, and Redonnet—teasing their responses to this convergence. It suggests that the recurrent fictional and cultural trope of the turning point has both aesthetic and critical potential. Bringing together analyses spanning literature, thought, and culture, the identifies and critiques the ways in which, on the eve of the 21st century, different theoretical and fictional approaches confront the manipulation of crisis discourses. Drawing on a ‘long twentieth century’ of crisis thinking, the book counters the perception that a postmodern model of perpetual crisis is culturally dominant, and establishes instead a new critical framework with which to respond to the fin de millénaire aesthetics of crisis. The book demonstrates how prose fictions afford critical purchase on the global market, and on French co‐implication in it. It identifies how the four contrasting writers reflect, perpetuate, and challenge the misogyny and symbolic violence of late capitalism. This book emerges as both problematic and problematizing, bespeaking the need to intervene in debates about the mass media, neoliberalism, global market economics, and sexual and postcolonial identities, while also demonstrating the enduring agency—critical and creative—of literature itself.

As an extended textual construction, first conceived of in 1908 and the last tranche of which reached its reading public almost two decades later, A la recherche du temps perdu was being written against a backdrop of momentous historical events in France. This book seeks to establish the nature of Proust’s engagement with many of the social and national issues of the day, from his early public campaigning, pre-1908, first as a Dreyfusard and then as an opponent of the separation of Church and State in 1905, through to the mature writer’s reflection, channelled through his novel, on key ideological issues: the new patterns of leisure and social mobility, the First World War and xenophobic nationalism, and continuing evidence of class-based politics in the immediate post-war period. By reconstructing attitudes to class and nation as articulated not just by Proust but by his contemporaries (Bourget, Barrès, Daniel Halévy, Benda, and others), the book attempts to gauge his volatile responses to these issues. In this regard, A la recherche functions as a capacious warehouse in which antagonistic social attitudes are voiced and tested, often, crucially, in ironic, ambivalent ways by Proust’s Narrator and characters. Analysis of the incremental composition of the novel further helps reveal the multiple styles of response to social antagonism that Proust’s work throws up. What emerges is a complex image of Proust as a free-floating iconoclast and radical commentator, a social conservative and fitful defender of class hierarchy, and a writer who, as Theodor Adorno observed, resisted social-class compartmentalization.

A la recherche du temps perdu occupies an undisputed place in the unfolding intellectual history of the ‘moi’ in France. There is, however, a general tendency in writing on this novel to celebrate the wonders of the moi sensible uncritically. This effaces all that is morally dubious or frankly experimental about Proust’s account of selfhood. It denies the rigour with which Proust tries to understand exactly why it is so difficult to explain one’s own actions to another. The great party scenes, for example, or the countless digressions, read like manuals on how acts of self-justification take place. Proust, however, is not merely interested in some kind of taxonomy of excuses, hypocrisy, disingenuousness, and Schadenfreude. He wants to know why self-justification tends to be interpreted as indicative of moral or psychological weakness. He asks himself whether self-justification informs isolated moments of everyday existence or whether it endures in an overall conception of self that lasts an individual’s lifetime. He investigates whether it dictates the functioning of an entire social group. Can we decide, he asks, whether justifying one’s self should be written off as morally repugnant, or taken seriously as evidence of moral probity?