History and Ideology in Proust
by Michael Sprinker
(London: Verso, 1998)

Synopsis
In this study of Proust's sequence of novels A la Recherche du temps perdu Sprinker discusses the historical and social dimensions of the work. The"Proustian theme of Time includes historical time, broadly the period of the Third Republic, the cataclysmic events of which were the Dreyfus Affair and the outbreak of the First World War. . . . {Sprinker is} concerned with Proust as an 'anatomist', supplying a 'minutely articulated anatomy of the general project and pathology of bourgeois society'. His principal theme is class, the shifting class formations of French society as it modernizes and puts in place the economic structures, forms of power and social relations of the new capitalist order." (Times Lit Suppl) Index.

Reviews and Commentary

From The Publisher: 
This book offers a socio-historical reinterpretation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Breaking with recent trends in Proust criticism, Michael Sprinker draws on historical scholarship to assess Proust's portrait of French society, and shows that the novel's account of its class structure and rivalries was both precise and critically engaged. He argues that in other areas, notably the nature of nationalist sentiment and gender ideology, Proust offers insight into phenomena studied only in fragmentary ways in previous historical writing on this crucial period.
 
From F.C. St. Aubyn - Choice: 
Now that semiotics and deconstruction have pretty much outlived their popularity, a return to Marxist theory as a basis for literary criticism seems somewhat retrograde. . . . Proust's concluding volume is certainly a great deal more than a simple 'meditation on history.' Instead of using history to illuminate the novel, Sprinker often seems to be using the novel to illustrate history. Nevertheless, he provides an interesting and very informative history ofthe first half-century of the Third French Republic. . . . Although the reader must plow through many pages of history before arriving at last at the hoped-for illumination of Proust's text, the results are frequently worth the effort.
 
From Christopher Prendergast - The Times Literary Supplement: 
{This} is a fine book, and a distinguished addition to the Cambridge Studies in French series. . . . The blurb of {the} book tells us that this is a 'work of Marxist criticism'. And so it is, but of a very subtle and sophisticated kind. . . . {Sprinker's} principal theme is class. . . . Proust's Third Republic is about the decisive showdown between an ascendant bourgeoisie and a declining aristocracy. . . . This, however, is to put Sprinker's account in excessively generalized and reductive terms. The merit of his book lies in its fidelity to Proust's own writing, in its attention to the detailed texture and rhythm of historical process. . . . In what is the most fascinating chapter, . . . there is the imbrication of the historical and the 'personal' in the fluid, polymorphous order of sexual relations: homosexuality and the crossing of class boundaries (Charlus, Jupien and Morel). . . . The last chapter, returning to the exclusion of the modern proletariat from Proust's world . . . is the least successful.
 

Table of Contents