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The author of Centuries of Childhood and other landmark historical works, Philippe Ariès (1914–1984) was a singular figure in French intellectual life. He was both a political reactionary and a path-breaking scholar, a sectarian royalist who supported the Vichy regime and a founder of the new cultural history—popularly known as l'histoire des mentalités—that developed in the decades following World War II. In this book, Patrick H. Hutton explores the relationship between Ariès's life and thought and evaluates his contribution to modern historiography, in France and abroad. 

According to Hutton, the originality of Ariès's work and the power of his appeal derived from the way he drew together the two strands of his own intellectual life: his enduring ties to the old cultural order valued by the right-wing Action Française, and a newfound appreciation for the methodology of the leftist Annales school of historians. A demographer by training, he pioneered a new route into the history of private life that eventually won him a wide readership and in late life an appointment to the faculty of the prestigious École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. At the same time, he fashioned himself as a man of letters in the intellectual tradition of the Action Française and became a perspicacious journalist as well as a stimulating writer of autobiographical memoirs. In Hutton's view, this helps explain why, more than any other historian, Philippe Ariès left his personal signature on his scholarship.

 Known for her far-reaching examinations of psychoanalysis, literature, and politics, Jacqueline Rose has in recent years turned her attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict, one of the most enduring and apparently intractable conflicts of our time. In Proust among the Nations, she takes the development of her thought on this crisis a stage further, revealing it as a distinctly Western problem.

Marcel Proust’s multivolume masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu, began to appear in 1913. Over the next fifty years, it gained a reputation as one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century. But the novel’s classic image as a completed work was later shattered by the discovery of unpublished drafts, and the “war of the Prousts” has kept scholars arguing over its definitive form ever since.

Christine M. Cano’s Proust’s Deadline presents a concise history of the publishing and reception of À la recherche du temps perdu, and sorts out the most important issues that have arisen from the ensuing debates about the text. She ultimately shows how this quintessential “book about time” tells another story about time’s passage: the story of Proust’s mortal confrontation with the temporality of writing, publishing, and reading.

A personal take on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, written by a woman born into the aristocratic world it describes.

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is many things: a staggering literary achievement, an evocation of an elite milieu, a complex reckoning with memory. For Laure Murat, it was also a map of the world into which she was born—the world of the French Aristocracy. Descended from French nobility on both sides, Murat saw the châteaux and balls of In Search of Lost Time as the backdrop to her own family story, understood anew through Proust’s eyes.

In this beautiful book, Murat explores both the oppressive constraints of the aristocratic life and the fluidity and linguistic virtuosity of Proust’s astonishing seven-volume novel, which shifts focus from codes of behavior to the experience of living. In Proust, a Family Affair, Murat celebrates the emancipating power of literature and the rewards of paying close attention to a text that may, in turn, provoke a close and loving attendance to the self.

Originally published in French, Proust, a Family Affair has won the Prix Médicis and was shortlisted for France’s most coveted literary award, the Prix Goncourt. This readable, moving translation into English by Charlotte Mandell will appeal to lovers of Proust and to all readers who appreciate personal explorations of literary masterpieces.

How the provinces, rather than cities or capitals, became the key setting dramatized in—but also transformed by—modern novels in English and French.

To be provincial is to mistake one’s narrow milieu for the world: it is to fall prey to an error of scale. But it is also to feel behind, belated, and excluded from the possibilities of the modern world. In this elegant study of the novel “on provincial time,” Victoria Baena argues that the literary geography of “the provinces” played a key role in forging European narratives of modernity.

In the wake of French revolutionaries’ suppression of older provincial identities and as Britain expanded its imperial reach, the provinces were reinvented on various scales: from countryside to small town, from domestic region to faraway colony. Baena brings together Marxist and feminist spatial theory with a close attention to the politics of narrative form in order to show how the remarkably mobile concept of the provinces developed across social and cultural frameworks from 1800 to 1933. Offering new interpretations of novels of the realist tradition—by Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Emily Brontë, George Sand, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, Alain-Fournier, James Joyce, and Claude McKay—she shows how the question of representing the provinces transformed the modern novel.

Provinces of the Mind illuminates some of the more pernicious fictions of provincialism. But it also describes, often movingly, the desire no longer to be provincial, along with the ambivalence and alienation that can entail. Ultimately, the book shows how literary critics can use the provinces to translate questions of literary geography across borders. By interrogating the provincialisms of our own time and place, Baena suggests, critics might make a better case for those worth retaining, as well as a better grasp of those to be left behind.