When Marcel Proust started to work on In Search of Lost Time in 1908, he wrote this question in his notebook: ‘Should I make it a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?’ Throughout his famous multi-volume work, Proust directly engages several philosophers, and few novels are as thoroughly saturated with philosophical themes and concepts as In Search of Lost Time. The Proustian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the rich philosophical range of Proust’s work and the first major volume of its kind. Including 31 chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is divided into seven clear parts: Proust’s life and works metaphysics and epistemology mind and language aesthetics ethics gender and sexuality predecessors, contemporaries and successors. Within these sections, key Proustian themes are explored from a philosophical standpoint, including time, the self, memory, imagination, jealousy, beauty, love, subjectivity and desire. The final section considers Proust in relation to important philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Deleuze. The Proustian Mind is essential reading for those studying aesthetics, philosophy of literature, phenomenology and ethics, and will also be of interest to those in literature studying modernism, French literature and the relationship between literature and philosophy.

The Proustian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the rich philosophical range of Proust's work and the first major volume of its kind. Includes 30 chapters by an international team of contributors.

First published in 1949, this book presents an extensive study of the mind and art of Proust. The text offers a detailed commentary on the many aspects of his literary imagination, discussing 'Proust the historian of the eternal passions, the creator of high comedy and memorable character, the imagist, the painter of a vanished society'. Numerous quotations are included in the original French, with the longer quotations given in both French and English. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Proust and literary criticism.

"My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop. I exist because I think... and I can’t stop myself from thinking." – Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea Writing the Mind: Representing Consciousness from Proust to Darrieussecq explores the works of seven ground-breaking thinkers and novelists of recent history to compare and contrast the varying representations of the conscious and the unconscious mind. Grounding his study in the writings of philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Marcel Proust, Simon Kemp explores the non-literary influences of science, faith and philosophy as presented in their works, demonstrates how writers learn from and sometimes deviate from preceding generations, and how they agree or disagree with their peers. Kemp’s elegant study also charts the rise and wane of Freudian influence on literature through the twentieth century, and the emergence of cognitive and neo-Darwinian ideas at the dawn of the twenty-first. In the work of these seven writers, we discover radically different understandings of how consciousness and the unconscious mind are constituted, which are the most salient characteristics of mental life, and even what it is that defines a mind at all.

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

Challenging the notion that modernism is marked by an “inward turn” – a configuration of the individual as distinct from the world – this collection delineates the relationship between the mind and material and social systems, rethinking our understanding of modernism's representation of cognitive and affective processes. Through analysis of a variety of international novels, short stories, and films – all published roughly between 1890 and 1945 – the contributors to this collection demonstrate that the so-called “inward turn” of modernist narratives in fact reflects the necessary interaction between mind, self, and world that constitutes knowledge, and therefore precludes any radical split between these categories. The essays examine the cognitive value of modernist narrative, showing how the perception of objects and of other people is a relational activity that requires an awareness of the constant flux of reality. The Fictional Minds of Modernism explores how modernist narratives offer insights into the real, historical world not as a mere object of contemplation but as an object of knowledge, thus bridging the gap between classical narratology and modernist experimentation.

A guide to three novels by Marcel Proust containing selections of critical essays, plot summaries for each work, and a biography of Proust.