Marcel Proust

Marion Schmid (University of Edinburgh)
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Less than a hundred years after his death, Marcel Proust is certainly France's greatest twentieth-century writer, if not, as critic David Ellison proclaims, “

the

French writer of all time”.1 Together with Joyce, Kafka and Thomas Mann he is one of the primary figures of European Modernism, an author whose work challenges traditional conceptions of time and space and relentlessly questions received notions of race, class, gender and sexuality. A prolific critic, writer of short fiction and translator in his youth, his literary reputation is based above all on his life work, the monumental seven-volume

A la recherche du temps perdu

[translated as

Remembrance of Things Past

or

In Search of Lost Time

], 1913-1927, one of the milestones in the study of human consciousness.

Proust was born on

2934 words

Citation: Schmid, Marion. "Marcel Proust". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 May 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3655, accessed 21 November 2024.]

3655 Marcel Proust 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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