Proust et le style

Jean Milly republishes this volume with a bibliographic update. Proust has always been primarily concerned with the question of style. His youthful letters, his first literary reviews attest to this interest. It was only after having developed an active reflection on the style of the great authors and tried to slip into their own writing by the series of Pastiches that he definitively engaged, in 1908, in the path of the novel. In search of lost time, as we know, is based on an aesthetic theory, which was formed little by little in the writer through readings, by Ruskin's commentary, by reflection on pictorial art, and in the framework of the abandoned romantic attempt of Jean Santeuil, before inspiring the end of the Rediscovered Time, last part of the novel. Style occupies a very fundamental place in this theory, because for Proust "Literature begins to exist only in style." It was therefore a question of locating in the whole of the Proussian work the emergence of this notion and of reconstructing its coherence of principle: the novel itself, the articles and the articles are thus explored from this point of view. epistolary comments that accompanied the gestation of the work. This is what makes this work an important introduction to any in-depth study of writer Proust.