These essays on L'Etranger celebrate its continuing influence throughout the world. Contributors come from Algeria, Samoa, India, Russia, France, Britain and the United States. Included are essays by prominent French and English-language authors for whom the novel has been an influential expression of contemporary sensibility. Other essays include feminist interpretations of Meursault, studies of Camus's narrative form, and explorations of the Algerian setting of the novel. Comparative studies show Camus's relation to the New Novel, to Greene and Orwell, to Jules Roy, and to Sartre.

This book presents a collection of essays exploring various aspects of the novel "The Stranger" by Albert Camus.

This book takes a fresh look at the novels and short stories of Albert Camus, from his early attempt at a first novel, La Mort heureuse, to the largely autobiographical Le Premier homme, unfinished at the time of his death. It seeks to see the oeuvre as a totality, coherent throughout, and examines the linkages and transformations from one work to the next, in the context of Camus's thought, attitudes and topoi or themes. The development of narrative techniques is examined, ranging from laconism to lyricism, from allegorism to realism, from humour to biting satire. The author traces the influence on Camus's thought of philosophers and thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche and the pre-Socratics on the one hand, and St Augustine, Pascal, and Simone Weil on the other, and considers the circularity of his work, from the early preoccupation with the finality of death and the search for meaning to the return to the origin and source in Le Premier homme. The enduring appeal of Camus's work is attributed to its humane openness and its challenges for our time.

This book examines ethical problems raised by a number of key twentieth-century theoretical and fictional texts by authors such as Levinas, Sartre, Beauvoir, Yourcenar, Duras and Genet. It argues that even texts which apparently espouse ethical positions based on respect for and responsibility towards others, frequently depict conflict as an insurmountable aspect of human relations. This is reflected at an aesthetic level, as these texts both describe the struggle for supremacy and replicate it in their relation to their readers.

In this study of solitude in high modernist writing, Edward Engelberg explores the ways in which solitude functions thematically to shape meaning in literary works, as well as what solitude as a condition has contributed to the making of a trope. Selected novels are analyzed for the ambiguities that solitude injects into their meanings. The freedom of solitude also becomes a burden from which the protagonists seek liberation. Although such ambiguities about solitude exist from the Bible and the Ancients through the centuries following, they change within the context of time. The story of solitude in the twentieth century moves from the self's removal from society and retreat into nature to an extra-social position within which the self confronts itself. A chapter is devoted to the synoptic analysis of solitude in the West, with emphasis on the Renaissance to the twentieth century, and another chapter analyzes the ambiguities that set the stage for modernism: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Selected works by Woolf, Mann, Camus, Sartre, and Beckett highlight particular modernist issues of solitude and how their authors sought to resolve them.

Exiles, Outcasts, Strangers explores how nine different "outsider" authors treat the theme of alienation in one of their major works. All the novels under review were written in a limited time span (1942 to 1987, approximately 50 years), and all are structured around a hero or heroine who remains culturally, ethically or aesthetically distant from his/her narrative counterparts. Works discussed: Albert Camus' L'Etranger; Richard Wright's The Outsider; André Langevin's Poussière sur la ville; Ernesto Sábato's El túnel; V.S. Naipaul's Guerrillas; Elie Wiesel's Le Cinquième fils; Norbert Zongo's Le Parachutage; Gisèle Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia, and Jean Genet's Querelle de Brest.

Chronological in character, the book seeks to evaluate the evolution of Camus's lifelong preoccupation with sociopolitical justice, as expressed in a range of nonfictional genres (essays, journalism, articles, speeches, notebooks, and personal correspondence), where the writer's own concerns come directly to the fore.".