description: English is the "second language" of A la recherche du temps perdu . Although much has been written about Proust's debt to English literature, especially Ruskin, Daniel Karlin is the first critic to focus on his knowledge of the language itself--on vocabulary, idiom, and etymology. He uncoversan "English world" in Proust's work, a world whose social comedy and artistic values reveal surprising connections to some of the novel's central preoccupations with sexuality and art. Anglomanie --the fashion for all things English--has been as powerful a presence in French culture as hostility toperfide Albion ; Proust was both subject to its influence, and a brilliant critic of its excesses. French resistance to imported English words remains fierce to this day; but Proust's attitude to this most contentious aspect of Anglo-French relations was marked by his rejection of concepts ofnational and racial "purity," and his profound understanding of the necessary "impurity" of artistic creation.
language: French
title: Proust's English
titlecomplete: Proust's English
ratings_count: 4
publisher: Oxford University Press