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  1. Home
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  3. Proust, the Body and Literary Form
  • Cited by 21
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
November 2009
Print publication year:
1999
Online ISBN:
9780511485756
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511485756
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, Literary Theory, European Literature, European Studies
Series:
Cambridge Studies in French (59)
Information

Book description

This 1999 study examines the connections between Proust's fin-de-siècle 'nervousness' and his apprehensions regarding literary form. Michael Finn shows that Proust's anxieties both about bodily weakness and about novel-writing were fed by a set of intriguing psychological and medical texts, and were mirrored in the nerve-based afflictions of earlier writers including Flaubert, Baudelaire, Nerval and the Goncourt brothers. Finn argues that once Proust cast off his concerns about being a nervous weakling he was freed to poke fun both at the supposed purity of the novel form. Hysteria - as a figure and as a theme - becomes a key to the Proustian narrative, and a certain kind of wordless, bodily copying of gesture and event is revealed to be at the heart of a writing technique which undermines many of the conventions of fiction.

Reviews

‘Finn has given us a splendid book.’

Source: Nineteenth-Century French Studies

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