Adame Watt, Marcel Proust
Londres : Reaktion Book, coll. "Critical lives", 2013.
EAN 9781780230948.
208 p.
Prix £10,95
Présentation de l'éditeur :
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) spent fourteen years creating À la recherche du temps perdu (‘In Search of Lost Time’), his seven-volume magnum opus. He died when only half was in print, unable to see it become one of the most important literary works of the twentieth century. More than 80 years later, the work still garners extraordinary levels of critical attention, and Proust’s habits, health and sexual preferences keep commentators and fans occupied to this day. In this concise biography, Adam Watt explores the life of a writer whose every experience was stored, dissected and redeployed within a vast fictional work.
Proust’s narrator speaks of desire, of love and loss, the contemplation of beauty, memory, ageing and the possibility of happiness, his experiences intensified through a sensibility heightened by long periods of ill health and isolation. After a consideration of Proust’s early years of personal and aesthetic experiment, Watt provides an engaging account of two intertwined processes taking place against the vibrant backdrop of the Belle Époque and the coming of the First World War: the growth of À la recherche and the coterminous decline of its author. Drawing on Proust’s immense correspondence, the accounts of his contemporaries and the insights of recent scholarship, Marcel Proust offers a rewarding new portrait of the novelist once described as ‘the most complicated man in Paris’.
Adam Watt is Associate Professor of French at the University of Exeter. He is a member of the ‘Equipe Proust’ at the ITEM/ENS, Paris. His previous books include Reading in Proust's À la recherche: ‘le délire de la lecture’ (2009) and The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust (2011).