Proust Between Two Centuries

Was Marcel Proust the last of the great classics or the first of the revolutionaries? Proust was thirty in 1901 and he died in 1922, living longer in the nineteenth century than he did in the twentieth. His work, especially the monumental sixteen-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past , draws its aesthetic affinities from the century of Baudelaire, Wagner, and Ruskin but at the same time escapes late nineteenth-century decadent aestheticism to reach toward an early twentieth-century modernist stance. In this new, major contribution to Proust studies, Antoine Compagnon analyzes the paradoxical power of Remembrance of Things Past by examining several fundamental fin-de-siecle arguments. Compagnon also explores Proust’s perverse reading of Italian painters, his fascination with etymologies, and sadism and homosexuality in Remembrance of Things Past . The book’s thesis holds that Proust’s essential ambivalence relative to all dogma is a key to his continual appeal to generations of readers.