For many, Proust is the supreme European writer of the twentieth century. This book tackles his achievement head-on. Art, death, sex, politics, loss, guilt, morality--Proust's major themes are revealed and explained here.

Proust Among the Stars is a matchless close reading of Remembrance of Things Past and a lesson in how to read the great books profitably and pleasurably. Malcolm Bowie asserts that Proust's novel is one of the great exercises in speculative imagining in the world's literature; and that its originality lies first in the quality of Proust's textual invention,...

The views of Freud, Proust and Lacan are depicted through this staging of a series of provocative dialogues between psychological science and imaginative literature of the twentieth century.

Cultural Writing. This volume contains never-before-translated prose selections by the father of the Symbolist movement, one of the most influential cultural figures of 19th-century France. Mallarme's letters to leading French intellectuals and artists of the time appear with his pieces on language and aesthetics, as he considers the state of contemporary French literature.

'Interdisciplinarity' has dynamized the Modern Humanities like no other recent academic trend. Yet, this presents serious challenges involving both translation and affect: how can we transmit facts and interpretations between disciplines, between different artistic media, between cultures, between the private and the public sphere? Some of the most distinctive voices in criticism from literature, music, the visual arts, psychoanalysis and philosophy, amongst others, show here their commitment to comparative thinking.

Mallarme is widely regarded as one of the most original and distinctively modern writers of the late nineteenth century. At the same time, his fame is accompanied by a certain notoriety, and his works are often thought of as unnecessarily complicated. In this study Malcolm Bowie shows that difficulty is of the essence in a number of Mallarme's major works, notably 'Prose pour des Esseintes' and Un Coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard. He argues that the poems are difficult because they are concerned with complex metaphysical questions and with speculative states of mind. Their closely...

A collection of essays on Constant, Baudelaire, Nerval and Flaubert, by Professor Alison Fairlie.

Malcolm Bowie (1943-2007) was described by A.S. Byatt as 'one of our best living critics. He writes beautifully, subtly and lucidly about very difficult subjects.' Bowie was Marshal Foch Professor of French at Oxford (1992-2002) and Master of Christ's College, Cambridge (2002-2006). He received numerous honours, was invited to speak all over the world, and in 2001 won the international Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism for his Proust Among the Stars. The essays and reviews in these volumes have never before been brought together. Ranging across literature, art, music, and...

Malcolm Bowie (1943-2007) was described by A.S. Byatt as 'one of our best living critics. He writes beautifully, subtly and lucidly about very difficult subjects.' Bowie was Marshal Foch Professor of French at Oxford (1992-2002) and Master of Christ's College, Cambridge (2002-2006). He received numerous honours, was invited to speak all over the world, and in 2001 won the international Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism for his Proust Among the Stars. The essays and reviews in these volumes have never before been brought together. Ranging across literature, art, music, and...

Malcolm Bowie (1943-2007) was described by A.S. Byatt as 'one of our best living critics. He writes beautifully, subtly and lucidly about very difficult subjects.' Bowie was Marshal Foch Professor of French at Oxford (1992-2002) and Master of Christ's College, Cambridge (2002-2006). He received numerous honours, was invited to speak all over the world, and in 2001 won the international Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism for his Proust Among the Stars. The essays and reviews in these volumes have never before been brought together. Ranging across literature, art, music, and...