cover image: The Growth of A la recherche du temps perdu : A Chronological Examination of Proust's Manuscripts from 1909 to 1914

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20.500.12592/sjrq63

The Growth of A la recherche du temps perdu : A Chronological Examination of Proust's Manuscripts from 1909 to 1914

2004

For forty years, scholars have had access to a vast array of documents that reveal the stages by which a few modest episodes grew into the vast and complex structure the world reveres as Marcel Proust's unique novel, A la recherche du temps perdu. Although many soundings have been made in this corpus, which comprises manuscript pages, exercise books, typescripts, and publisher's proofs, Anthony Pugh's study is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive view of the story that the documents reveal, at least in the years before the outbreak of war in 1914.

A crucial feature of the research is the rigorous establishment of the chronological sequence of the documents, a task complicated by Proust's habit of returning to sketches already written, amplifying them with extensive additions in the margins and on the facing pages, often reorganizing them, and finally reworking them in another form, sometimes physically intercalating pages of the first version into the new one. Anthony Pugh analyses with scrupulous care every document, facing all the multi-faceted problems they present, and showing why many solutions, some of them widely accepted by Proust scholars, have to be questioned.

It emerges from this investigation that however unsystematic Proust was in his method of composing, there is an inner logic in the way he oscillates between writing new incidents and editing texts already extant. Now, for the first time, the whole story of the way in which A la recherche du temps perdu grew during the first six years of its gestation is told in full, both in its general thrust and in its fine details.

manuscripts criticism, textual proust, marcel, 1871-1922 1871-1922. à la recherche du temps perdu

Authors

Anthony R. Pugh

Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references
Control Number Identifier
CaOOCEL
Dewey Decimal Classification Number
843/.912
Dewey Decimal Edition Number
22
General Note
Issued as part of the desLibris books collection
ISBN
9781442681415
LCCN
PQ2631.R63
LCCN Item number
A864 2004eb
Modifying agency
CaBNVSL
Original cataloging agency
CaOONL
Physical Description | Extent
1 electronic text (2 v. : facsims.)
Published in
Canada
Publisher or Distributor Number
CaOOCEL
Rights
Access restricted to authorized users and institutions
System Control Number
(CaBNVSL)thg00600998 (OCoLC)696034177 (CaOOCEL)418606
System Details Note
Mode of access: World Wide Web
Transcribing agency
CaOONL

Table of Contents