No major writer of the twentieth century seems a less likely candidate for Marxist analysis than Marcel Proust. A wealthy dilettante and notable fixture in the Parisian salons, Proust chronicled and anatomized the world of France's upper classes, earning a reputation among both contemporaries and subsequent generations for aesthetic refinement and social snobbery.

Yet in a reconsideration of Proust's masterpiece, A Ia recherche du temps perdu, Michael Sprinker reveals Proust to be an acute observer of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and aristocracy in the Third Republic. Drawing on historical scholarship on the Third Republic, Sprinker shows how Proust's novel can extend our understanding of this period, particularly in areas less well mapped in standard historical studies such as nationalist ideology and gender roles.

Michael Sprinker was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the History of Historical Materialism and Ghostly Demcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx are also published by Verso. Together with Mike Davis, he founded Verso's Haymarket Series and guided it until his death in 1999.

240 pages

Paper
1 85984 188 0
£14/ US$20 / CAN$26