Days of Reading

Days of Reading
Author: Marcel Proust
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2008-08-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0141963395

In these inspiring essays about why we read, Proust explores all the pleasures and trials that we take from books, as well as explaining the beauty of Ruskin and his work, and the joys of losing yourself in literature as a child. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

On Reading Ruskin

On Reading Ruskin
Author: Marcel Proust
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1989-07-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780300045031

Early in his career, Marcel Proust, who greatly admired John Ruskin, published translations of two works by the English critic - La Bible d'Amiens (1900) and Sesame et les Lys (1906). He wrote a substantial preface to each book and provided discursive notes that were themselves often small essays. Rare now, even in their French versions, the preface to La Bible d'Amiens and the notes to both books have never before been available in English. In bringing them together with the preface to Sesame et les Lys, this new book completes the translation into English of the important critical writings of Proust. "Expertly edited and translated and . . . introduced by a brilliant forty-page essay and a fascinating bibliographical note by Richard Macksey. It is an event for celebration. . . . Proust emerges from these essays and notes as one of the truly great critics."--Gabriel Josipovici, Times Literary Supplement "A welcome addition to English-language Proust texts and, I think, one long overdue."--Germain Bree, Kenan Professor Emerita, Wake Forest University

Monsieur Proust's Library

Monsieur Proust's Library
Author: Anka Muhlstein
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2012-11-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1590515676

Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels. In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhlstein, the author of Balzac’s Omelette, draws out these themes in Proust's work and life, thus providing not only a friendly introduction to the momentous In Search of Lost Time, but also exciting highlights of some of the finest work in French literature.

Proust and America

Proust and America
Author: Michael Murphy
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2007-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1846313872

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. “It is strange,” Proust wrote in 1909, “that, in the most widely different departments . . . there should be no other literature which exercises over me so powerful an influence as English and American.” In the spirit of Proust’s admission, this engaging and critical volume offers the first comparative reading of the French novelist in the context of American art, literature, and culture. In addition to examining Proust’s key American influences—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, and James McNeill Whistler—Proust and America investigates the previously overlooked influence of the American neurologist George Beard, whose writings on neurasthenia and “American nervousness” contributed to the essential modernity of the author’s work.

Proust and the Arts

Proust and the Arts
Author: Christie McDonald
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2015-11-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107103363

Offers new perspectives on Proust's complex and creative relation to a variety of art forms from different eras.