This book was shortlisted for the R.H. Gapper prize 2011. On 8 February 1937 the 23yearold Albert Camus gave an inaugural lecture for a new Maison de la culture or community arts centre in Algiers. Entitled La nouvelle culture mditerranenne The New Mediterranean Culture Camuss lecture has been interpreted in radically different ways while some critics have dismissed it as an incoherent piece of juvenilia others see it as key to understanding his future development as a thinker whether as the first expression of his socalled Mediterranean humanism or as an early indication of what is seen as his essentially colonial mentality. These various interpretations are based on reading the text of The New Mediterranean Culture in a single context whether that of Camuss life and work as a whole of French discourses on the Mediterranean or of colonial Algeria and French discourses on that country. By contrast this study argues that Camuss lecture and in principle any historical text needs to be seen in a multiplicity of contexts discursive and otherwise if readers are to understand properly what its author was doing in writing it. Using Camuss lecture as a case study the book provides a detailed theoretical and practical justification of this multicontextualist approach.