Proust, the Body and Literary Form

This 1999 study examines Proust's involvement with fin-de-siècle 'hysteria', and its impact on the writing of his great novel.

Michael R. Finn (Author)

9780521641890, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 March 1999

226 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.5 kg

'Finn has given us a splendid book.' Nineteenth-Century French Studies

This 1999 study examines the connections between Proust's fin-de-siècle 'nervousness' and his apprehensions regarding literary form. Michael Finn shows that Proust's anxieties both about bodily weakness and about novel-writing were fed by a set of intriguing psychological and medical texts, and were mirrored in the nerve-based afflictions of earlier writers including Flaubert, Baudelaire, Nerval and the Goncourt brothers. Finn argues that once Proust cast off his concerns about being a nervous weakling he was freed to poke fun both at the supposed purity of the novel form. Hysteria - as a figure and as a theme - becomes a key to the Proustian narrative, and a certain kind of wordless, bodily copying of gesture and event is revealed to be at the heart of a writing technique which undermines many of the conventions of fiction.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]