History and Ideology in Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu and the Third French Republic

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.