Peter Brooks

''the social kaleidoscope was shifting''The Guermantes Way, the third volume of Marcel Proust''s In Search of Lost Time, provides a transition from the realm of adolescence into the adult social world of Belle Epoque Paris. Its pages buzz with worldly conversations, with bravado and posturing, infatuation, scandal, prejudice, and intrigue. To the fore is Proust''s ear for spoken language and how it provides a stage for human foibles as well as inventiveness and panache. This is a broad canvas studded with amusing anecdotes, surprising vignettes and touching scenes, as well as fascinating characters including the indomitable Duchesse de Guermantes and her enigmatic relation the Baron de Charlus. The Guermantes Way immerses readers into a society in flux, as the old aristocracy cedes to a wealthy, rising bourgeoisie and everyone, regardless of class or standing, must navigate the perilous waters of the Dreyfus Affair. Through these lenses, Proust explores questions of substance and superficiality, and identity and belonging, in highly memorable scenes concerning friendship, love, mortality, and loss. The novel is an extraordinary chronicle of pre-war Paris as well as a vital stepping stone in Proust''s novel, building on the formative, partially learned lessons of the second volume, In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom, and preparing the ground for the portentous challenges of the volumes that lie ahead.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

In this enthralling re-creation of American novelist Henry James'' famous ten-month trip around the United States, lauded critic Peter Brooks brings to life both the literary giant and America in its Gilded Age.In 1904, after two decades of living and travelling abroad, Henry James returned to the United States to discover a world drastically different from the one he had left behind. Suddenly, the future of the world seemed to be in his native land, which he had once considered provincial, lacking in nourishment for the novelist. James thus set forth to refamiliarize himself with the United States, travelling the breadth of the land and exercising his acute powers of observation to document all that he saw. James''s ten-month journey across America and its product, the ethnographic work The American Scene, are the focus of Henry James Comes Home, scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks?s dazzling follow-up to his book Henry James Goes to Paris. Brooks combines biography and criticism to recreate James''s American journey, tracing his travels around New England, down south to Florida, across the Midwest, up the coast of California, and eventually to Seattle and Portland. For James, being American was "a complex fate," and Brooks shows how James''s keen remarks on rampant materialism and the challenges at the heart of democracy are still of enduring relevance to us in this day.