Proust’s Imaginary Museum

Reproductions and Reproduction in "À la recherche du temps perdu"

von Gabrielle Townsend

234 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

This study of Marcel Proust’s creative imagination examines an aspect of the novel that has hitherto been largely overlooked: the author’s dependence on secondary visual sources. Proust made constant use of reproductions – photographs, engravings, postcards, illustrations in books – as sources of reference and as narrative devices in their own right. Furthermore, he consistently chose to use reproductions in preference to originals, whether people, places or works of art. Bringing together for the first time a mass of factual information documenting Proust’s use of second-hand images, the author argues that reproductions play a key role in the work’s complex, multi-layered structure. Rather than being hampered by their limitations, Proust took advantage of their distancing effect to free his imagination and to insert new layers of meaning into his narrative.

• Reihe: Cultural Interactions: Studies in the Relationship between the Arts
• Themen: Biographie, Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft Geschichte und Kritik Literaturwissenschaft, allgemein 1900 bis 2000
• ISBN: 9783039111244
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 23.04.2008
• Größe: 21 x 14.8 cm
• Verlag: Peter Lang Group AG, International Academic Publishers