Proust, the Body and Literary Form

This 1999 study examines the connections between Proust''s fin-de-siècle ''nervousness'' and his apprehensions regarding literary form. Michael Finn shows that Proust''s anxieties both about bodily weakness and about novel-writing were fed by a set of intriguing psychological and medical texts, and were mirrored in the nerve-based afflictions of earlier writers including Flaubert, Baudelaire, Nerv...