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in Proust: A Visual Companion to Proust’s ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (2008), which reproduces all of the paintings referred to in the novel. The catalogue from the major 1999 exhibition Marcel Proust: l’écriture et les arts, edited by Jean-Yves Tadié, is a significant resource. Many scholars have studied Elstir’s role and that of Proust’s imaginary artists more generally, independently and in relation to living artists of Proust’s era (see Michel Butor’s ‘Les œuvres d’art imaginaires chez Proust’, 1964). Christopher Prendergast’s essay ‘Literature, Painting, Metaphor: Matisse/Proust’ in his The Triangle of Representation (2000) is illuminating. On the art and architecture of Venice in the Search (and much more besides), Peter Collier’s Proust and Venice (1987) is a stimulating guide, and Richard Bales’ Proust and the Middle Ages (1975) takes readers even further back in time, exploring another layer of Proust’s composite aesthetics.

Studies concerned with Proust and literature – his influences and borrowings, his relations to contemporary and canonical writers, his influence on subsequent generations – are legion. Dominique Jullien’s Proust et ses modèles: les ‘Mille et Une Nuits’ et les ‘Mémoires’ de Saint-Simon (1989) is a revealing account of these two pervasive presences that undergird much of the Search. Some comparative studies seek to explore similarities or divergences of novelistic practice between Proust and his contemporaries or near-contemporaries (such as Sarah Tribout-Joseph’s recent Proust and Joyce in Dialogue, 2009 or Hugues Azérad’s L’univers constellé de Proust, Joyce et Faulkner: le concept d’épiphanie dans l’esthétique du modernisme, 2002), whilst others explore the presence of inter-textual relations between Proust’s novel and other works (Annick Bouillaguet’s Marcel Proust: le jeu intertextuel [Marcel Proust: Intertextual Play] (1990) outlines the relevant critical-theoretical thinking on these matters). Peter Brooks’ recent essay ‘Modernism and Realism: Joyce, Proust, Woolf’ is a rewarding example of comparative criticism, deftly sketching the relation of his three named figures’ approaches to representation in the context of two of the predominant currents of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary history.18

Self, sex and society

Brian Rogers’ chapter ‘Proust’s Narrator’ in the Cambridge Companion is a good starting point on the question of ‘self’ in the novel, ditto the chapter ‘Self’ in Bowie’s Proust among the Stars. Kristeva, Deleuze and Richard all contribute greatly to our understanding of the Narrator’s character. Richard Terdiman’s chapters on Proust (above all on ‘Narration in La Fugitive’) in The Dialectics of Isolation: Self and Society in the French Novel from the Realists to Proust (1976) are highly rewarding, subtle readings which point tellingly towards how Proust, unexpectedly perhaps, anticipates aspects of Beckett’s writing. Bersani’s Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art and Edward Hughes’ Marcel Proust: A Study in the Quality of Awareness (1983) take us closer in to the nature of the Narrator’s mind.

Proust’s own sexuality and the representation of love and sexuality in his novel have long engaged critics and readers alike (Alison Finch’s Cambridge Companion essay gives an admirable overview of ‘Love, Sexuality and Friendship’). Recently William Carter has brought his biographer’s expertise and his critical acumen to bear on the subject in Proust in Love (2006), although it is the biographical that predominates over the fictional in this particular study. J. E. Rivers’ Proust and the Art of Love: The Aesthetics of Sexuality in the Life, Times and Art of Marcel Proust (1981) remains an important reference. An acute and theoretically inflected account of sexuality in its relation to Proust’s aesthetics, touching on issues of subjectivity, gender and identity, is found in Emma Wilson’s Sexuality and the Reading Encounter: Identity and Desire in Proust, Duras, Tournier and Cixous (1996). Rewarding accounts of homosexuality’s various inscriptions in the Search