Overview
- Moves with ease through a variety of discourses, including psychoanalysis, philosophy, theories of emotion/affect, and literary criticism to present careful close readings of Proust’s famed novel
- Forms a bold and unique argument in its dual assessment of mourning and creativity
- Sheds light on the ethical dilemmas arising at the end of the novel, making this study a timely and much needed contribution to Proust studies
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism (PSATLC)
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Table of contents (4 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This study explores Proust’s answers to some of the fundamental challenges of the inevitable human experience of mourning. Thinking mourning and creativity together allows for a fresh approach to the modernist novel at large, but also calls for a reassessment of the particular historical and social challenges faced by mourners at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book enables the reader to acknowledge loss and forgetting as an essential part of memory, and it proposes that this literary topos has seminal implications for an understanding of the ethics, aesthetics, and erotic in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, Anna Magdalena Elsner develops an original theory of how mourning and creativity are linked by emphasizing that ethical dilemmas are central to an understanding of the novel’s final aesthetic apotheosis. This sheds new light on the enigmatic and versatile nature of mourning but also pays tributeto those fertile tensions and paradoxes that have made Proust’s novel captivating for readers since its publication.
Reviews
“Its lucid and nuanced discussion of the Proustian ethics of creation is part of what makes this book a valuable addition to the field of Proust studies and a pleasure to read.” (Synne Ytre Arne, Modern Language Review, Vol. 115 (3), July, 2020)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Anna Magdalena Elsner is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of French and the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London, UK. She completed her doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, UK.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Mourning and Creativity in Proust
Authors: Anna Magdalena Elsner
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60073-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-60330-2Published: 14 March 2017
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-60073-8Published: 09 March 2017
Series ISSN: 2634-6311
Series E-ISSN: 2634-632X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 249
Number of Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations
Topics: European Literature, Psychoanalysis, Fiction, Nineteenth-Century Literature