In 1899 Marcel Proust read a translation of Ruskin's The Lamp of
Memory in a Belgian magazine. Fourteen years later he
back-projected the experience onto the narrator of Du cote de chez
Swann who describes himself as a boy reading the self-same piece in
the garden at Combray. In between lay a period of intermittent
enthusiasm for Victorian writing: a period which saw the
refurbishment of Proust's method and a fundamental rethinking of
his views. Much of this reassessment was achieved in relation to
English writers whom Proust adopted, absorbed and then as often as
not discarded. The end result was to enable him to pass from one
aesthetic to another. It is the contention of this book that the
clue to this process can be found not only in Proust's evolving
views on memory and time but also in his progression through a
three-fold typology of form: from 'mimetic form'
(art-imitating-the-real) through 'mnemonic form'
(art-imitating-memory) to 'abstract form' (art-imitating-itself).
The progress from one to another is illustrated through Proust's
reactions to Carlyle, Darwin, Emerson, Ruskin, George Eliot, Hardy,
Stevenson, Wells and Wilde. There is also a chapter on the
connection in Proust's mind between literary and art criticism and
his delayed response to the Ruskin-Whistler trial of 1878. A final
chapter relates these matters to the current debate as to the
parallel between the nineteenth century fin-de-siecle and our own.
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