The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [0]
Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27) changed the course of modern narrative fiction. This Introduction provides an account of Proust’s life, the socio-historical and cultural contexts of his work and an assessment of his early works. At its core is a volume-by-volume study of A la recherche, which attends to its remarkable superstructure as well as to individual images and the intricacies of Proust’s finely stitched prose. The book reaches beyond stale commonplaces of madeleines and memory, alerting readers to Proust’s verbal virtuosity, his preoccupations with the fleeting and the unforeseeable, with desire, jealousy and the nature of reality. Lively, informative chapters on Proust criticism and the work’s afterlives in contemporary culture provide a multitude of paths to follow; the book charges readers with the energy and confidence to move beyond anecdote and hearsay and to read Proust’s novel for themselves.
Adam Watt is Senior Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Reading in Proust’s A la recherche: ‘le délire de la lecture’ (2009), and editor of Le Temps retrouvé Eighty Years After/80 ans après: Critical Essays/Essais critiques (2009).
The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust
Adam Watt
Royal Holloway, University of London
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521734325
© Adam Watt 2011
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2011
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Watt, Adam A. (Adam Andrew), 1979–
The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust / Adam Watt.
p. cm
ISBN 978-0-521-51643-3 – ISBN 978-0-521-73432-5 (pbk.)
1. Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Proust, Marcel
1871–1922. à la recherche du temps perdu. I. Title.
PQ2631.R63Z9817 2011
843′.912–dc22
2010052338
ISBN 978-0-521-51643-3 Hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-73432-5 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
For Stace
Mon amour, ma chérie
Contents
Texts and abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1 Life
Chapter 2 Contexts
Politics and society
Science, technology and medicine
Literature, philosophy and the arts
Chapter 3 Early works and late essays
Pleasures and Days
Jean Santeuil
Against Sainte-Beuve
Late essays
Chapter 4 In Search of Lost Time
Swann’s Way
Within a Budding Grove
The Guermantes Way
Sodom and Gomorrah
The Captive
The Fugitive
Time Regained
Chapter 5 Proust criticism
Getting started
Early studies
Philosophy and fiction
Style and narrative technique
Proust and the arts
Self, sex and society
Essay collections
Genetic criticism
Epilogue: Proustian afterlives
Notes
Further reading
Index
Texts and abbreviations
All quotations are taken from the Vintage Classics edition of In Search of Lost Time in six volumes, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (except for Time Regained, translated by Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin), revised by Terence Kilmartin and D. J. Enright (Vintage, 2000–2). Page references are also provided to the single-volume ‘Quarto Gallimard’ edition of A la