Profile
Edward J. Hughes has research interests in the field of modern and contemporary French and Francophone literature, specialising in the socio-critical reading of work by a number of authors, including Marcel Proust, Albert Camus and Mohammed Dib. He is a former Vice-President and President of the Society for French Studies. His most recent book, Egalitarian Strangeness: On Class Disturbance and Levelling in Modern and Contemporary French Narrative (with Liverpool University Press), was published on 1 May 2021. The book, which draws on the work of French thinker Jacques Rancière, explores embedded forms of social and cultural ‘apportionment’ with reference to a dozen authors, among them Simone Weil, Paul Nizan, Marie Ndiaye, Claude Simon and François Bon. Egalitarian Strangeness identifies in the works of these authors scenes of class disturbance and egalitarian encounter.
Research
Publications
Books and Edited Volumes
1983 Marcel Proust: a Study in the Quality of Awareness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (paperback reprint, 2010)
1995 Albert Camus, 'Le Premier Homme'/'La Peste'. Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications
1998 & Peter Dunwoodie (eds). Constructing Memories: Camus, Algeria and 'Le Premier Homme'. Stirling: Stirling French Publications
2001 Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature: from Loti to Genet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (second edition, 2006)
2007 (editor) The Cambridge Companion to Camus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
2011 Proust, Class, and Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press
2015 Albert Camus. London: Reaktion Books (reprinted 2016); in collaboration with Chicago University Press.
[The book was awarded the Franco-British Society Literary Prize in April 2016. It has been translated into Chinese (Peking University Press, 2020).]
2021 Egalitarian Strangeness: On Class Disturbance and Levelling in Modern and Contemporary French Narrative. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press
2005 c. 30,000-word contribution (7 main articles, 20 short articles, 12 notes). In Dictionnaire Marcel Proust (eds Annick Bouillaguet and Brian Rogers). Paris: Champion; volume awarded the Prix Emile Faguet of the Académie Française.
Articles and book chapters
1. 1983 '"La vérité est carrée": Reflections on Camus's Le Renégat ou un esprit confus', La Chouette, 10: 76-86
2. 1984 'Proust's "petits personnages barométriques"', in Humanitas: Studies in Honour of Henri Godin (ed Robert McBride). Belfast: Modern Languages Association of Northern Ireland, pp. 125-35
3. 1986 'Space and Place in Duras's L'Amant', La Chouette, 15: 35-45
4. 1993 'Parisian Pastoral in A la recherche du temps perdu', Romance Studies, 22, 17-25
5. 1994 'Meaning, Money and Knowledge: a Reading of Balzac's La Recherche de l'absolu', Romance Studies, 23: 31-42
6. 1994 'Prisons and Pleasures of the Mind: a Comparative Reading of Cervantes and Proust', in Cervantes and the Modernists. The Question of Influence (ed Edwin Williamson). London: Tamesis, pp. 55-72
7. 1994-95 'Sexual Topographies in Proust's Recherche'. Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 3: 205-14
8. 1995 'The Mapping of Homosexuality in Proust's Recherche', Paragraph: A Joumal of Modem Critical Theory, 18 ii: 148-62
9. 1998 'Introduction' and ‘"Tranquillement monstrueux": Violence and Kinship in Le Premier Homme’, in Constructing memories: Camus, Algeria and 'Le Premier Homme' (Peter Dunwoodie and E. Hughes eds). Stirling: Stirling French Publications, 6 (1998), v-viii + 21-32
10. 1999 'Proustian Metamorphosis: the Art of Distortion in A la recherche du temps perdu', Modern Language Review, 94.3: 660-72
11. 1999 'Building the Colonial Archive: the Case of Camus's Le Premier Homme', Dissident Algeria, special number of Research in African Literatures, 30.3: 176-93
12. 2000 'Entre la banalité et la marginalité: refus et quête du sens dans La Vie matérielle de Marguerite Duras'. In Lectures de Duras (ed Brian Stimpson), Dalhousie French Studies, 50: 117-27
13. 2000 'Cultural Stereotyping: Segalen against Loti'. In Segalen: Reading Diversity / Lectures du Divers (eds Charles Forsdick and Susan Marson). Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, pp. 25-38
14. 2001 'Proust and Social Spaces'. In The Cambridge Companion to Proust (ed Richard Bales). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 151-67
15. 2001 'Marcel Proust'. In Encyclopaedia of Life Writing (ed Margaretta Jolly). London: Fitzroy Dearborn, pp. 730-33
16. 2003 'Cataclysm at One Remove: the War in Le Temps retrouvé'. In Approaches to Teaching Proust's Fiction and Criticism (ed Elyane DezonJones). New York: Modern Language Association of America, pp. 38-43
17. 2003 'The Good Cause'. Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 2.1: 79-82
18. 2003 'Textual and Tribal Assimilation: Representing Jewishness in A la recherche du temps perdu'. Jewish Culture and History, 6.1 (Summer 2003), 152-73
18a 2004 [item 18 also published as book chapter. In The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture (eds Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman). London: Frank Cass/Vallentine Mitchell, pp.152-73]
19. 2004 'Exotic Drift: Pierre Loti between Contemporaneity and Anteriority'. In Eastern Voyages, Western Visions: French Writing and Painting of the Orient (ed Margaret Topping). Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 241-64
20. 2005 'Haunted and Haemorrhaging: the Representation of Violence in Mohammed Dib's La Nuit sauvage', French Studies, LIX, 1, 63-69
21. 2005 'L'ordre social dans Combray'. In Marcel Proust Aujourd'hui, 3: 63-80
22. 2005 ‘"Sous un signe double": Language and Identity in Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia'. In Challenges of Translation in French Literature (ed Richard Bales). Bern: Lang, pp. 221-35
23. 2007 '"Le prélude d'une sorte de mort historique": Underpinning Assimilation in Camus's Chroniques Algériennes’. L'Esprit Créateur, 47.1: 7-18
24. 2009 'A Witness on the Edge: Jean Genet and the Shatila Massacres'. In Aesthetics of Dislocation in French and Francophone Literature and Art: Strategies of Representation (eds Daisy Connon et al.). Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, pp. 53-68
25. 2009 'Hierarchies'. In 'Le Temps retrouvé': Eighty Years After / 80 ans après: Critical Essays / Essais critiques (ed Adam Watt). Berlin: Peter Lang, pp. 117- 31
26. 2010 '"Sur un point solitaire du globe": Camus, Algeria, Conflict and Art'. Expressions maghrébines, 9.2: 135-50
27. 2010 'Perspectives sur la culture populaire dans l'oeuvre de Proust'. In Morales de Proust, Cahiers de littérature française IX-X (eds Mariolina Bertini and Antoine Compagnon). Bergamo: Bergamo University Press/Paris: L'Harmattan, 69-82
28. 2010 'Albert Camus'. In Encyclopaedia of the Bible and Its Reception, vol 3. Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter.
29. 2011 'On the Nation and its Culture: Proust, Barrès and Daniel Halévy'. In Au seuil de la modernité: Proust, la littérature et les arts. Essays in Memory of Richard Bales (eds Nigel Harkness and Marion Schmid). Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 129-48
30. 2011 'Pierre Michon, "Small Lives", and the Terrain of Art', Romance Studies, 29.2: 67-79
31. 2013 ‘Expérience et connaissance du quotidien dans l’oeuvre de Camus’. In Albert Camus au quotidien (eds André Benhaïm and Aymeric Glacet). Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2013, pp. 159-75
32. 2013 ‘Politics and Class’. In Marcel Proust in Context (ed Adam Watt). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 160-66
33. 2013 ‘The Dreyfus Affair’. In Marcel Proust in Context (ed Adam Watt). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 167-73
34. 2014 ‘Lacunary knowledge in Sebald and Proust’. Modern Language Review, 109.1, 15-34
35. 2014 ‘“Les lignes vaines et solitaires de mon écriture”: “Word” and “World” in Proust’s Recherche’. Romanic Review, 105.3/4: 201-13
36. 2014 ‘Proust, Benda et “la passion nationale”. In Proust écrivain de la Première Guerre mondiale (eds Philippe Chardin and Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer). Dijon: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, pp. 101-109
37. 2015 ‘“Cette ignorance si envahissante”: Oblivion, Posterity, Art’, Marcel Proust Aujourd’hui, 12: 18-34
38. 2016 'The Renewal of Narrative in the wake of Proust'. In The Cambridge Companion to French Literature (ed John D. Lyons). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 187-203
39. 2016 ‘“Et la raison vacilla”’: Sociality as Burden in Tahar Djaout and Mohammed Dib’. In Lucidity: Essays in Honour of Alison Finch (eds Ian James and Emma Wilson). Cambridge and Abingdon: Legenda (MHRA and Routledge), pp. 157-68
40. 2016 ‘Nation et Narration dans Du côtê de chez Swann’. In ‘Du côtê de chez Swann’ ou le cosmopolitisme d’un roman français (eds Antoine Compagnon and Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer). Paris: Honoré Champion, pp. 189-201
41. 2017 ‘“Cette fermeture du sens sur quoi, migrant, je bute”: Crossing Cultures in Mohammed Dib’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 21.3: 298-305
42. 2017. '"Comme on aimait en Dieu, je vois dans la guerre". Identität und Identifikation in Marcel Prousts Briefwechsel während der Kriegsjahre', in Wolfram Nitsch and Jürgen Ritte, eds., Marcel Proust (Berlin, Insel Verlag: 2017), pp. 181-200
43. 2020. 'Circuits of Reappropriation: Accessing the Real in the Work of Didier Eribon'. In What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th- and 21st-century French Literature and Thought (eds Patrick Crowley and Shirley Jordan). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 179-94
44. 2020. ‘Le commun et le quelconque: Proust en 1919’. In Proust politique: De l’Europe du Goncourt 1919 à l’Europe de 2019, Quaderni Proustiani, 14 (October 2020), 63-72