The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust

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This book is the first to describe the development of Proust’s treatment of material objects from his earliest work Les Plaisirs et les jours to his mature novel A la recherche du temps perdu. It is unique in its exploration of the movement within Proust’s work from unreflective and spontaneous representation to a meta-narrative of consciousness. The latter finds particular resonance in a peculiarly Proustian pictoriality which has been largely unnoticed. By exploring connections between Proust’s pictoriality and his reflections on ‘matter’ and ‘surface’, this book suggests a new and radical approach to the modernism of A la recherche du temps perdu