This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

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.

This 1983 book attempted to address the dearth of analysis of the crisis of hypersensitivity in many of Proust's characters.

"Craig begins by attributing the early introduction of the Recherche to the intimate friendship between Proust and the pianist-composer Reynaldo Halm, who was born in Caracas. He then shows in chapter 1 how literary critics of the principal newspapers and literary magazines of such countries as Venezuela, Argentina, and Chile examined this French text, which we know today as one of the fundamental works of modernism. Shortly thereafter interest in the Recherche spread to Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, and Colombia. Eventually it would be read in all parts of the New World. Over the years Spanish Americans have continued to write about the Recherche and have published several noteworthy books on it, which are included in the comprehensive bibliography which serves as an appendix."--BOOK JACKET.