The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust

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 perd