Encyclopedia > A la recherche du temps perdu

  Article Content

À la recherche du temps perdu

Redirected from A la recherche du temps perdu

À la recherche du temps perdu is a French novel, or sequence of novels by Marcel Proust. It is considered to be part of the Western canon. The title translates roughly as In Search of Lost Time. A new translation announced in the late 1990s uses this title; previous English translations have gone by Remembrance of Things Past.

The original work was published in several volumes between 1913 and 1927. Rather than recount a clear sequence of events, the novel focuses on the narrator's memories: his recollections and the connections between them.

Early in the first volume, the narrator experiences a clear flash of memory from his childhood as he tastes a madeleine (a type of small sponge cake[?]) dipped in tea. This is probably the novel's best-known scene.

À la recherche du temps perdu consists of 7 volumes, although different editions split the work in different ways:

  • Du côté de chez Swann (1913)
  • À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919, awarded the 1919 Prix Goncourt).
  • Le côté de Guermantes (1922)
  • Sodome et Gomorrhe (1922)
  • La prisonnière (1923)
  • La fugitive (1925, published as Albertine disparue because another book with a similar title was published around the same time)
  • Le temps retrouvé (1927)

Un Amour de Swann, part two of Du côté de chez Swann, is often published as a volume by itself. Because it forms the self-contained story of Charles Swann's love affair with Odette de Crécy and is relatively short, it is generally considered a good introduction to the work and is often a set text in French schools.

Main Characters

  • The narrator
  • Charlus
  • Swann
  • Odette de Crécy
  • Francoise
  • Duchesse de Guermantes (Oriane)
  • Albertine
  • Gilberte
  • Mme Verdurin
  • Robert de Saint-Loup

Adaptations



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Kings Park, New York

... 0.62% from other races, and 1.04% from two or more races. 3.33% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race. There are 5,480 households out of which ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 38.3 ms