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. In a radical rereading of the Dreyfus affair through the lens of Marcel Proust in dialogue with Freud, Rose offers a fresh and nuanced account of the rise of Jewish nationalism and the subsequent creation of Israel. Following Proust’s heirs, Beckett and Genet, and a host of Middle Eastern writers, artists, and filmmakers, Rose traces the shifting dynamic of memory and identity across the crucial and ongoing cultural links between Europe and Palestine. A powerful and elegant analysis of the responsibility of writing, Proust among the Nations makes the case for literature as a unique resource for understanding political struggle and gives us new ways to think creatively about the violence in the Middle East.

Published anonymously in 1824, this gothic mystery novel was written by Scottish author James Hogg. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner was published as if it were the presentation of a century-old document. The unnamed editor offers the reader a long introduction before presenting the document written by the sinner himself.

Writing in 1927, Julien Benda described France as being afflicted by the twin scourges of narrow, class-based politics and rabid nationalism. He nevertheless identified Marcel Proust (who had died in 1922) as a writer who had refused to embrace the ideological narrowness of his age. Edward J. Hughes seeks to assess how Proust and his novel A la recherche du temps perdu might be understood in relation to issues of class and nation. A la recherche was produced in momentous times. As an extended textual construction, first conceived of in 1908 and the last tranche of which appeared posthumously almost two decades later, it was assembled against a backdrop of major historical events: pre-war tensions in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair and the Separation of Church and State (issues on which Proust had campaigned publicly); the First World War and the atmosphere of narrow nationalism and Germanophobia which the conflict generated; and the continuing polarization in class politics in the years after the First World War. These all find echoes in A la recherche and Hughes establishes how the exposure given to questions of class and nation needs to be understood historically. He demonstrates that the frequently entrenched positions of Proust's contemporaries at times square with the language and images of social conservativism to be found in A la recherche. Yet alongside that, Hughes unearths evidence that points to Proust as a free-floating, often playful, iconoclast and radical commentator who, as Theodor Adorno observed, resisted bourgeois compartmentalization.

A paradox haunts the bildungsroman: few protagonists successfully complete the process of maturation and socialization that ostensibly defines the form. From the despondent endings of Dickens’s Great Expectations and Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel to the suicide of Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré and the demise of Eliot’s Maggie and Tom Tulliver, the nineteenth-century bildungsroman offers narratives of failure, paralysis, and destruction: goals cannot be achieved, identities are impossible to forge, and the narrative of socialization routinely crumbles. Examining the novels of Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Samuel Butler, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust, Falling Short reveals not only a crisis of character development but also a crisis of plotting and narrative structure. From the inception of literary realism in the 1830s to the height of modernism a century later, the bildungsroman presents itself as a key symptom of modern Europe’s inability to envision either coherent subjectivity or successful socialization. Rather than articulating an arc of personal development, Stević argues, the bildungsroman tends to condemn its heroes to failure because our modern understanding of both individual subjectivity and social success remains riddled with contradictions. Placing primary texts in conversation with the central historical debates of their time, Falling Short offers a revisionist history of the realist and modernist bildungsroman, unearthing the neglected role of defeat in the history of the genre.

This transnational collection of essays, interviews, and creative pieces on the 1982 Siege of Beirut explores literary representations of the siege by a diverse set of writers alongside journalism and other media including film and art. The book investigates and promotes an awareness of an ethics of representation on questions of extreme emotional investment, comparing representations of the siege to representations of other traumatic events, visiting responses from those of different cultural backgrounds to the same event and considering implications with respect to comparative approaches. Chapters explore how literature, journalism and art contribute to overcoming the dangers of forgetting and denial, memorial excess and fundamentalism, the radicalization of violence, and the complete breakdown of trust on international levels, asking how they challenge geopolitical, intellectual, and psychological states of siege and instead promote awareness, acknowledgement, mourning, and justice across divided communities. The book extends the use of postcolonial methodologies affiliated with history, international relations, and psychoanalysis (memory, trauma) to Middle-Eastern studies, and visits the siege’s effect on different forms of memory and memorialization: selective memory, trauma, gaps and fissures in historical accounts, recording of eyewitness reports, and artistic re-imaginings and realizations of alternative archives.

Underlying Julia Kristeva's latest work is the idea that otherness - whether it be ethnic, religious, social, or political - needs to be understood and accepted in order to guarantee social harmony. Nations Without Nationalism is an impassioned plea for tolerance and for commonality, aimed at a world brimming over with racism and xenophobia. Responding to the rise of neo-Nazi groups in Germany and Eastern Europe and the continued popularity of the National Front in France, Kristeva turns to the origins of the nation-state to illustrate the problematic nature of nationalism and its complex configurations in subsequent centuries. For Kristeva, the key to commonality can be found in Montesquieu's esprit general - his notion of the social body as a guaranteed hierarchy of private rights. Nations Without Nationalism also contains Kristeva's thoughts on Harlem Desir, the founder of the antiracist organization SOS Racisme; the links between psychoanalysis and nationalism; the historical nature of French national identity; the relationship between esprit general and Volksgeist; Charles de Gaulle's complex ideas involving the "nation" and his dream of a unified Europe. In the tradition of Strangers to Ourselves, her most recent nonfiction work, Nations Without Nationalism reflects a passionate commitment to enlightenment and social justice. As ethnic strife persists in Europe and the United States, Kristeva's humanistic message carries with it a special resonance and urgency.

"Drawing on his own experience as a photographer and author, Brassai discovers a neglected aspect of Proust's interests, offering us a fascinating study of the role of photography both in Proust's oeuvre and in early-twentieth-century culture."--BOOK JACKET.