Proust, the Body and Literary Form

by Michael R. Finn

Overview

Michael Finn examines the vogue for nervous afflictions in France in the late nineteenth century, and compares Proust's anxieties about writing In Search of Lost Time to the concerns of earlier writers suffering from nervous conditions, including Flaubert, Baudelaire, Nerval and the Goncourt brothers. Once Proust cast off his fear of being a nervous weakling, he was able to make fun of the supposed purity of the novel form. The author shows how hysteria becomes a key to Proustian narrative, and discusses how together with Proust's use of pastiche, narrative pranks and games, it unlocks a writing technique that undermines conventional fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521027540
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/02/2006
Series:	Cambridge Studies in French , #59
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.63(d)
Lexile:	1590L (what's this?)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Proust between neurasthenia and hysteria; 2. An anxiety of language; 3. Transitive writing; 4. Form: from anxiety to play; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"By viewing A la recherche as a narative of disease...Finn succeeds in clarifying many aspects of the novelist's manner and matter...Finn has given us a splendid book." Gerald Prince, Nineteenth Century French Studies

"...an intriguing psychological portrait in which Proust the writer finds a cure for his own inability to write literature by conceiving of literary form in dialogic terms—which allowed him to write the novel that he always knew was within him." Choice

From the Publisher