Twelve authors, from W.B. Yeats to Franz Kafka, and how the TLS reacted to their work on its first appearance, and something of how it has come to be viewed in retrospect.

This study explores two interweaving networks of imagery which are vital to key thematic areas of Proust's fictional construct. These are Christian and biblical, and classical and mythological figures of speech.

The strange M. Proust - the narrator, the author, and the embodiment of A la Recherche du Temps perdu - is now so canonical a writer that his very strangeness is easily overlooked. His book made of other books, his epic composed of extraordinary miniatures, his orderly structure where every law is subverted, his chronology where time can be undone and his geography where places can superimpose: in these, and many other ways, Proust continues to astonish even readers who have engaged with him for their entire careers. In this book, arising from the Princeton symposium of 2006, major critics come together to offer provocative readings of a work which is at the same time classical and unusual, French and foreign, familiar and strange. The book is dedicated to the memory of Malcolm Bowie (1943-2007), whose keynote address was one of his last major lectures. Other contributors include David Ellison, Anne Simon, Eugene Nicole, Joseph Brami, Raymonde Coudert, Christie McDonald, Michael Wood and Antoine Compagnon.

Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27) changed the course of modern narrative fiction. This Introduction provides an account of Proust's life, the socio-historical and cultural contexts of his work and an assessment of his early works. At its core is a volume-by-volume study of In Search of Lost Time, which attends to its remarkable superstructure, as well as to individual images and the intricacies of Proust's finely-stitched prose. The book reaches beyond stale commonplaces of madeleines and memory, alerting readers to Proust's verbal virtuosity, his preoccupations with the fleeting and the unforeseeable, with desire, jealousy and the nature of reality. Lively, informative chapters on Proust criticism and the work's afterlives in contemporary culture provide a multitude of paths to follow. The book charges readers with the energy and confidence to move beyond anecdote and hearsay and to read Proust's novel for themselves.

Mimesis and Theory brings together twenty previously uncollected essays on literature and literary theory by one of the most important thinkers of the past thirty years.