Proust's Gods

Proust's Gods explores two interweaving networks of imagery which are vital to key thematic areas of Proust's fictional construct. These are Christian and biblical, and classical and mythological figures of speech. Proust's metaphorical vision plucks legends and figures drawn from these sources out of their original settings and thrusts them with all their persistent resonances into new and often unlikely contexts. Yet these deliberately incongruous juxtapositions and the sliding scale of tones they produce are also strangely apt, and amongst the richest sources of humorous effects in the novel. The study also analyses the increasing sophistication of Proust's imagery from his earliest writings onwards, and re-evaluates the role of the largely-ignored Correspondance in his development as a writer. Considered as texts rather than biographical documents, the letters are identified as a flexible stylistic 'stamping ground' and an arena for experimentation for later works.