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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2007

Edward J. Hughes
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
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Summary

Who reads Camus? Were we to focus on the admittedly narrow world of academic publications and interest, we might well conclude that Camus has come to be an author more written about outside France than inside it. It was in France in the early 1970s that he was notoriously dismissed as an author whose philosophy is only suitable for sixth-form study. Long before that, as Olivier Todd reminds us, Sartre was decidedly patronising about the philosophical shortcomings of Le Mythe de Sisyphe, although somewhat more approving in his response to L'Etranger when these texts appeared in 1942. Yet Camus's ability to attract mass audiences both within the hexagon and beyond is undisputed. Jeanyves Guérin reported in the 1990s that statistically speaking, Camus remained the author most widely read by school pupils and university students in France. In a recent survey for French television, Camus was placed fifty-ninth in a poll to establish 'les plus grands Français de tous les temps' ('the greatest French people of all time'), above Sartre, who occupied ninety-fifth place. In the English speaking world, his work regularly features on undergraduate reading lists for courses on twentieth-century French literature, politics and philosophy.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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  • Postface
  • Edited by Edward J. Hughes, Queen Mary University of London
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Camus
  • Online publication: 28 September 2007
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521840481.016
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  • Postface
  • Edited by Edward J. Hughes, Queen Mary University of London
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Camus
  • Online publication: 28 September 2007
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521840481.016
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Postface
  • Edited by Edward J. Hughes, Queen Mary University of London
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Camus
  • Online publication: 28 September 2007
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521840481.016
Available formats
×