Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 From Belle Epoque to First World War
- 2 The vast structure of recollection
- 3 Ruskin and the cathedral of lost souls
- 4 The birth and development of A la recherche du temps perdu
- 5 Lost and found: the structure of Proust’s novel
- 6 Proust’s Narrator
- 7 The unconscious
- 8 The texture of Proust’s novel
- 9 Proust’s human comedy
- 10 Proust and social spaces
- 11 Love, sexuality and friendship
- 12 Proust and the fine arts
- 13 Proust and posterity
- Postlude
- Select bibliography
- Index
13 - Proust and posterity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 From Belle Epoque to First World War
- 2 The vast structure of recollection
- 3 Ruskin and the cathedral of lost souls
- 4 The birth and development of A la recherche du temps perdu
- 5 Lost and found: the structure of Proust’s novel
- 6 Proust’s Narrator
- 7 The unconscious
- 8 The texture of Proust’s novel
- 9 Proust’s human comedy
- 10 Proust and social spaces
- 11 Love, sexuality and friendship
- 12 Proust and the fine arts
- 13 Proust and posterity
- Postlude
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
As we turn the page from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, the literary reputation of Marcel Proust is clearly on the rise. Not only does he continue to be considered a primary figure in European Modernism occupying the same rarefied aesthetic atmosphere as James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, but increasingly, within the field of French Studies, he is being singled out as the twentieth-century writer, or even, the French writer of all time. Thus Jean-Yves Tadié, the author of the most comprehensive biographical study on Proust to date and also the general editor of the 1987–9 Pléiade edition of A la recherche du temps perdu, does not hesitate to assert:
[A la recherche du temps perdu] recapitulates the entire literary tradition, from the Bible to Flaubert and Tolstoy, and all literary genres. Proust’s novel also espouses the romantic and symbolist dream, shared by Mallarmé and Wagner, of a synthesis of all the arts, painting, music and architecture. Thus are born works which escape the constraints of their time period, their country, their author, and whose glory continues to grow. It has often been said that, if England has Shakespeare, Germany Goethe, Italy Dante, France had no one writer to equal them. The number of critical works devoted to the author of the Recherche suggests that France now has, and will have tomorrow, Marcel Proust.
(1, x-xi; my translation.)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Proust , pp. 200 - 215Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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