'Deuxième série: le monde de la tragédie et l'esprit de révolte' (CI, 229) ('Second series: the world of tragedy and the spirit of revolt') (NI, 193), wrote Camus in April 1941, and the scattered notes and sheets of what was to become La Peste acquired further shape and context. Having completed the cycle of 'the Absurd', in a France torn by war and enemy occupation, Camus had for some time been convinced that 'Si ignoble que soit cette guerre, il n'est pas permis d'être en dehors' (CI, 167) ('However vile this war may be, no one can stand aside from it' (NI, 139)). Such a conviction is at work throughout Camus's second cycle, which includes La Peste (1947), the essay L'Homme révolté (1951) and the plays L'Etat de siège (1948) and Les Justes (1949). In keeping with this cycle's exploration of tragedy and revolt, La Peste chronicles the imprisonment, exile, oppression and suffering experienced by the citizens of Oran when a plague strikes. Yet the novel also dramatises the victory of human spirit and solidarity over that which would threaten and dismember it: a plague, an enemy occupation, existence itself. In alluding to such varied forms of oppression, Camus asserted, referring to his experience of the German occupation: 'Je veux exprimer au moyen de la peste l'étouffement dont nous avons tous souffert et l'atmosphère de menace et d'exil dans laquelle nous avons vécu' (CII, 72) ('I want to express by means of the plague the stifling air from which we all suffered and the atmosphere of threat and exile in which we lived' (NII, 53)). Yet, he went on - announcing the text's various layers of meaning and their dynamic oscillation between event and abstraction, literal and figurative meaning, chronicle and allegory - 'Je veux du même coup étendre cette interprétation à la notion d'existence en général' (CII, 72) ('I want at the same time to extend that interpretation to the notion of existence in general' (NII, 53)).

The collection of five brief essays that go to make up L'Envers et l'Endroit were first published by Charlot in Algiers in 1937 in a limited print run of 350 copies. Written by Camus in his early twenties, the essays, which he dedicated to his mentor Jean Grenier, include a sometimes raw account of family life for a child growing up in real poverty in working-class colonial Algiers. In his preface to the second edition published two decades later, Camus accounts for his reluctance over many years to authorise a new edition. While insisting that he denies nothing of the portrait of life contained in the collection, he expresses doubts about the writing, which he sees as being maladroit and in places unnecessarily high-flown. Yet in spite of their aesthetic limitations, these early essays stand, he argues with hindsight, as potent testimony to a childhood that involved not only prolonged poverty but also what he claims to have been genuine happiness. In a letter to the poet René Char in October 1953, he writes of a legacy that he cannot ignore: 'Oui, renoncer à l'enfance est impossible. Et pourtant, il faut s'en séparer un jour, extérieurement au moins . . . j'ai grandi dans les rues poussiéreuses, sur les plages sales. Nous nagions et, un peu plus loin, c'était la mer pure. La vie était dure chez moi, et j'étais profondément heureux, la plupart du temps' (Ess, 1180) ('Yes, renouncing childhood is impossible. And yet one has to separate oneself from it, at least externally . . . I grew up in dusty streets, on dirty beaches. We used to swim and, a bit further out, the sea was so pure. Life at home was hard, and I was deeply happy, most of the time.')

Albert Camus was a writer who emerged from social obscurity to become a best-selling author and post-war icon in France and beyond, winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957. His premature death in January 1960 - he and the publisher Michel Gallimard were killed in a car crash at Villeblevin, south of Paris - did nothing to diminish that iconic status. Yet behind this tidy, poverty-to-celebrity-to-tragedy narrative, a more complex life story and body of writing beckon. In his Nobel acceptance speech at Stockholm in December 1957, he points out that his life story is part of the collective history of his generation, which has lived through 'une histoire démentielle' ('an insane history'), one that has had to contend with 'le mouvement destructeur de l'histoire' (Ess, 1072, 1074) ('the destructive movement of history'). Born on the eve of the First World War, Camus continues, he and his contemporaries reached adulthood as Hitler obtained power and as the first of the revolutionary trials got under way in the Soviet Union. And just to round off the education of his generation, a string of confrontations follow - with civil war in Spain, the Second World War and the concentration camps. Meanwhile the children of this generation face the spectre of nuclear destruction. Camus's conclusion is that a death instinct is at work in the collective history of his times as tyranny's 'grands inquisiteurs' (Ess, 1073) ('grand inquisitors') hold sway.

The life of Albert Camus (1913-60) was profoundly affected by the three major tragedies which dominate the history of twentieth-century France: the Great War (1914-18), World War II (1939-45) and the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62). It is unusual that Camus's destiny should have been so closely bound up with that of metropolitan France. As a French petit colon born in Algeria, he spent most of his life outside France. It was not until he was in his late thirties that, as a celebrated writer, Camus settled in France permanently. After the very successful publication of La Peste in 1947, he was able to set up house in the sixth arrondissement in Paris, near the premises of his editor, Gallimard.

Camus was born on 7 November 1913, on the eve of the First World War, in the little village of Mondovi near Constantine, one of the major cities of what was then French Algeria. His mother was of Spanish origin, his father a so-called pied-noir, a Frenchman born in the colony and whose family had lived there for several generations. In his last and unfinished work, the autobiographical novel Le Premier Homme, Camus claims that his forebears had fled from Alsace after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1. According to Camus's biographer Olivier Todd, however, the Camus family came from the Bordeaux region in the south-west of France. This would make it more probable that it was economic rather than political reasons that led them to try their fortune in Algeria.

In February 1937 twenty-four-year old Albert Camus delivered the opening address at the launch of a new Maison de la Culture in Algiers. He placed the undertaking squarely within the cultural debate going on in an Algiers dominated by a group of well-established European artists and intellectuals known as the 'Algerianists', supporters (under the leadership of the novelists Louis Bertrand and Robert Randau) of the reactionary politics of Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras in mainland France. As Camus's title made clear, for the young people launching this new venture - a group of selfstyled 'left-wing intellectuals' (Ess, 1321) united through university, amateur theatre, political activism - the issue of the day was 'La culture indigène. La nouvelle culture méditerranéenne' ('Indigenous Culture. The New Mediterranean Culture'). To today's (postcolonial) reader, this title might suggest an anthropological assessment of a colonised culture and its absorption into, and contribution to, a new, perhaps hybridised, cultural construct. The stated objective, announced with a high seriousness scarcely veiled by a declared modesty, would seem to reinforce this perception: 'servir la culture méditerranéenne, contribuer à l'édification, dans le cadre régional, d'une culture dont l'existence et la grandeur ne sont plus à démontrer. Nous voulons seulement aider un pays àséxprimer lui-même. Localement. Sans plus. La vraie question: une nouvelle culture méditerranéenne est-elle réalisable?' ('to serve Mediterranean culture, to contribute, within a regional framework, to the construction of a culture whose existence and grandeur are widely recognised. We simply wish to help a country express itself.

Although countless books have been written on Albert Camus, critical monographs devoted to portraits of women in his works are extremely limited in number. To date, only two books have appeared on the subject: Anthony Rizzuto's Camus: Love and Sexuality and Geraldine Montgomery's Noces pour femme seule: le féminin et le sacré dans l'oeuvre d'Albert Camus (Nuptials for Woman Alone: the Feminine and the Sacred in the Work of Albert Camus). Nevertheless, a number of articles have been devoted to the feminine, and especially the maternal, in Camus's fiction and theatre. With the posthumous publication of Le Premier Homme in March 1994, considerable attention has once again focussed on the mother figure in his work, associated, more than ever, with Camus's beloved homeland, Algeria.

The mother figure is central to Camus's work, even when she is more absent than present, as in L'Etranger. In fact, a number of absent women haunt Camus's fiction: Rieux's wife in La Peste and the woman on the bridge in La Chute, to cite but two examples. As for supposedly secondary characters like Marie and even more so the Arab nurse in L'Etranger, they are anything but minor figures. Camus himself remarked in 1959 that the characters dearest to him were, along with Céleste, the café-owner in L'Etranger, Marie and, from Les Justes, Dora (Ess, 1922). With respect to the nurse, whom very few critics have considered, Patrick McCarthy devotes an eloquent albeit brief essay to this woman - watching over the French-Algerian dead - who, in her association with Meursault's mother, already foreshadows the psychoanalytical and political dimension that will characterise the second part of the novel.

When, during a speech on the future of Europe delivered in Brussels in February 2005, President George Bush cited a sentence from La Chute, it is unlikely that he intended to stir up memories of the infamous quarrel between Camus and Sartre that had occurred over fifty years before. However, by evoking Clamence's understanding of freedom as 'a long-distance race' (F, 97) ('une course de fond' (TRN, 1544)), Bush unwittingly cited from Camus's clear and bitter parody of Sartre in which the protagonist presents himself as a 'partisan éclairé de la servitude' ('an enlightened advocate of slavery'), before claiming that he used to spread the word 'freedom' on his toast at breakfast (TRN, 1543; F, 97). Bush's neo-conservative appropriation of Camus as a critic of terrorist violence accordingly backfired, for the author aims to indict those - Sartre and his colleagues at Les Temps modernes included - who, he claims, babble on about freedom whilst at the same time exploiting its rhetoric as a convenient smokescreen for their own oppressive purposes. The anecdote is telling for a number of reasons: not only does it suggest the enduring, resonant legacies of the Camus-Sartre dispute; it also serves as a warning to those who ignore the ambiguities of that dispute, and attempt instead to present its principal players in reductively ideological terms.

Despite the persistent presence of Camus and Sartre in French culture, it is difficult five decades on to imagine the public interest generated by the philosophical, literary and ideological debates underpinning their very personal quarrel. The 1952 exchange of articles nevertheless achieved the status of a national dispute, continuing a Gallic tradition of high profile intellectual feuds. There was wide press coverage of the acrimonious exchanges, and Francis Jeanson, in the initial article that had effectively sparked the controversy, stated accurately that the disagreement encapsulated some of the most urgent issues of his time.

Act 3 scene 6 of Caligula stages a key encounter between Caligula and Cherea, Camus's murderous protagonist and one of his eventual assassins. Here, the two men articulate the ethical impasse at the heart of the philosophy of the Absurd. Caligula suggests that Cherea must believe in 'quelque idée supérieure' (TRN, 78) ('some higher principle' (COP, 83)); Cherea does not entirely accept this, but neither does he entirely deny it:

Cherea uses an aesthetic term rather than a moral one to characterise his position: some actions are 'plus belles' (literally 'more beautiful') than others, not inherently better or more just. Caligula's retort that all actions are equivalent does not necessarily contradict Cherea's argument, since neither man asserts the existence of a higher value which would make it possible to distinguish between one action and another in strictly ethical terms. It is also significant here that neither man seriously tries to persuade the other to change his views. Each states what he believes, but makes no attempt to offer principles, reasons or explanations which would demonstrate the validity of his own opinion. We are presented here with the confrontation of two positions which are coherent within their own terms, but which are utterly incompatible. One man believes that some actions are preferable to others, whilst the other insists that no action has inherent value above any other.

History and resistance

Le Mythe de Sisyphe may be the most historically dated of Albert Camus's major texts, the work most clearly marked by the conditions under which it was written and thus the one that might appear to have aged the least well and have the least to say to modern-day readers. The essay was written during what Camus in his 1955 preface to its American translation calls 'the French and European disaster' (MS, v), and it is difficult not to relate its sense of tragic hopelessness to France's ignominious defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany, the Occupation and Vichy collaboration. The text that Camus also calls 'the most personal of those (he has) published in America' (MS, vi) could also be read as a reflection of his own struggle with tuberculosis during this period, since he was so seriously ill he expressed doubts at times that he would survive. But perhaps even more than these historical and personal factors Le Mythe may be dated by the concept of the Absurd itself to which Camus's name is still linked today, even though he admitted as early as 1955 that he had already 'progressed beyond' (MS, vi) its propositions. The postwar generation in general quickly moved beyond the Absurd as well, which is why its interest today could be considered largely historical.

Following upon four years of near silence after the controversy with Sartre in Les Temps modernes surrounding the disputed philosophical claims of L'Homme révolté, the publication in 1956 of La Chute dispelled any premature notion that Camus might have lost his considerable talents and intellectual relevance as a writer. In a tightly structured imaginative fable centred in an examination of human duplicity remarkable for its mixture of lucidity and ferocious wit, Camus made his return to centre stage both assertive and enigmatic. Of all Camus's texts, and in contradistinction to the outspoken straightforward presentation of Le Premier Homme which was to follow it, La Chute is the most resistant to our understanding as readers, for two essential reasons: (1) it is highly personal; its rhetorical mode is that of a monological confession; and (2) it eludes our grasp by alluding to numerous other works of literature in the Western tradition, from the Bible through Dante to Dostoyevsky, to such a degree that we have difficulty separating levels of meaning in an effort to attain the work's semantic core. Of all Camus's texts, La Chute has generated the broadest diversity of critical readings precisely because of the apparently uncontrollable multiple meanings that inhere within its personal and allusive potential.

James Joyce’s (1882-1941) reputation can be daunting for the first-time reader. The term 'Joycean' is readily adopted to suggest impenetrability, bewildering experimentalism, obscurity and inaccessibility. Although Ulysses (1922) regularly makes it into the top four of '100 Books of the Century' polls, it is famously a book more talked about than read. Its predecessor, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), is often seen to offer a route into Ulysses's formal experimentations. But Finnegans Wake (1939), with its lack of a discernible plot and its invented language saturated with multilingual puns, far exceeds Ulysses’s resistance to navigation. Any baffled reader who turns to literary criticism for help might well be further disconcerted. Joyce once boasted, 'I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.' His prophecy has come true in the ever increasing critical studies of Joyce which crowd library shelves, offering fresh perspectives on a writer discussed almost as frequently as Shakespeare. Yet Joyce’s perceived difficulty, and the range of analyses responding to that difficulty, need not be so daunting. For 'difficulty' is a product of the richness of his fictions, a richness of form, of content, of wit and of pleasure which makes Joyce and the 'Joycean' command such influence over both his contemporaries and the many writers in his wake.

Joyce is commonly perceived to stand at the centre of his aesthetic moment, the 'father of high modernism', the protégé, friend and inspirer of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and other modernists, whose long shadow hangs over later writers. However, Joyce’s centrality should not distract us from the many ways in which he spoke from the periphery of the literary culture he would come to dominate. Born in Dublin in 1882, the eldest child in a rapidly increasing and increasingly impoverished Catholic family, the young Joyce self-consciously wrestled with questions of poverty, class, faith and nation.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was determined to produce not only something beautiful in her art but also something all her own. She was, as her numerous diaries and essays demonstrate, intrigued by notions of time, space and consciousness. The impact of such influences upon the creation of identity is a central theme in her work and the representation of these complicated ideas in fiction was her greatest challenge. Woolf wrote in 1921, 'If a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must … there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest.' The traditional plot-led structure of 'the novel' was a source of frustration for her as she believed that it did not reflect what it felt like to be alive. 'Life', she wrote, 'is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo.' Woolf’s nine novels represent her negotiation of, and response to, that persistent frustration as she worked towards forging a new form of writing, one that would reflect the 'halo', the 'uncircumscribed spirit' of life. Her resultant experiments with narrative structure enabled her to explore new ways of representing time, space and consciousness in her works.

In 'A Sketch of the Past' (1941), Woolf suggested that most people spend their lives wrapped in a kind of 'cotton wool' that limits their perceptions, protecting them from strong sensations. 'From this,' she states, 'I reach what I might call a philosophy; … that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern.' For Woolf, this 'pattern' is a paradigm of connection, of universal meaning and purpose normally unseen or unnoticed in everyday life.

On 31 May 1902, the 44-year-old Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) wrote to William Blackwood of Blackwood’s publishing house. In a respectful but nonetheless assertive letter, Conrad accepts that he is 'long in [his] development' (his first novel was published in 1895), cites the precedents of William Makepeace Thackeray, Sir Walter Scott and George Eliot, and then distinguishes himself from these illustrious predecessors.

'Modern'. 'New'. The immediate force of these key words in Conrad’s letter is, to put it bluntly, to explain the relative unprofitability of his fiction: in the paragraph prior to the one from which his comments are taken, Conrad refers ironically to the present as 'a time when Sherlock Holmes looms so big'. He was clearly aware that there were different ways in which a writer could be modern or new. On the one hand is the newness associated with technical or formal innovation and originality, and on the other hand the newness established by the use of aspects of social or cultural modernity as fictional subject matter. Both Conrad’s lifelong friend John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells, with whom his friendship was much more up and down, were clearly modern in the second of these two senses, but less so if at all in the first. (Along with Arnold Bennett, they form the trio of 'Edwardians' criticized by Virginia Woolf in her essay 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown', 1924, and dubbed 'materialists' in her essay 'Modern Fiction', 1919.)

Can fiction be modernist when it aims to help us to recapture a premodern, or even 'primitive', relationship with nature and with our own bodies, and dissolve boundaries between the self and the world? This is the question we must answer in considering D. H. Lawrence’s (1885-1930) conflictual relationship with literary modernism. In Lawrence’s most challenging statements about the purpose of the novel, he emerges as something like an ecological antimodernist, continuing a tradition of Romantic organicism which modernism often appears to leave behind.

The novel, in Lawrence’s view, goes astray when it affiliates itself with specific types of experimental modernism, because its real benefits derive from its potential to help us to resist the damaging effects of modernity. The novel’s immediate task might be to offer us aesthetic representations of the world in all its complexity, but this task, for Lawrence, is part of a greater project of cultural regeneration. In a series of essays written in 1923 and 1925, including 'Art and Morality' and 'Why the Novel Matters', Lawrence shows an unrestrained contempt for the modernist novel, at least as it is practised by some of his celebrated contemporaries. He argues that there are three categories of modern fiction: 'serious', 'popular' and 'valuable'. 'Serious' and 'popular' fiction represent fiction as it is being written in the 1920s, and both derive from and propagate the self-consciousness which Lawrence regards as the great problem of modern culture. Self-consciousness, and here Lawrence is influenced by his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, is an awareness of self as separated from the natural world, a mental condition arising from the influence of modern, rational, scientific thought, with its dualisms and harsh delineation of subject and object.

To talk of 'early' modernism immediately raises questions of definition and periodization. Such questions have indeed been key to the long 'postmodernist' period of retrospective construction and reconstruction of 'modernism' itself. The recent tendency has been to stretch the term to neglected figures and literatures. 'It should surely be clear by now', Andrzej Gasiorek contends, 'that modernism is a portmanteau concept, which comprises a variety of often mutually incompatible trajectories.' Accordingly, the periodizing dates of modernism have shifted this way and that; from, for example, the years 1890-1930 adopted by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane in 1976 to Jane Goldman’s 1910-45 in 2004. Critics have of course selected specific years and episodes within these bookends, but at its widest, the period of modernism could on this reckoning evidently run for fifty-odd years, from the 1890s to 1945.

The list of novelists with some claim to be included under the heading 'early modernism' is therefore a long one. Did Thomas Hardy in some ways anticipate modernism? Does the 'naturalism' of George Gissing belong to the modernist project? Were H. G. Wells or E. M. Forster modern or modernist? What is our estimate now of the undoubted newness of D. H. Lawrence’s fiction? Was this primarily a matter of new social content rather than artistic form? And what of contemporary examples of gothic fiction, or the advent of science fiction or the detective novel? Do we think of these as generic 'popular fiction' and are they opposed from the outset to modernism? Bradbury and MacFarlane’s volume indexes all the named writers here (which is not to say they are regarded as modernist).

This chapter will explore the link between time, modernism and the novel. In literary modernism it is the novel, almost alone among genres, which is typically linked to time and to innovations in the representation of temporality. Despite T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1944) being about time, time is not a structural concept for poetry (excluding narrative poetry). This chapter will not discuss innovations in temporality as a response to aspects of modernity external to the novel itself, whether developments in the other arts, in philosophy, in scientific theory, in technology (including train travel, the synchronization of clocks, the telegraph, photography and the cinema) or in the organization of the work day under capitalism. Our specific concern is rather what in the formal properties and history of the novel makes it the one among literary genres in which the modernist preoccupation with time is worked out. The answers to this question will necessarily select among the various external theories of modernism and time those that best explain the novel’s internal development. For time is not simply a subject of the modernist novel; it governs its formal experiments. Just as, according to Michel Foucault, 'philology was to untie the relations that the grammarian had established between language and external history in order to define an internal history', a history internal to the novel can be isolated, alongside the novel’s role in history.