{"product_id":"marcel-proust-against-sainte-beuve-classics-9780140444971","title":"Against Sainte-Beuve (Classics)","description":"No other major work of literary criticism has ever been so intimately bound up with the creation of a work of fiction. \u003cp\u003e The essays collected here not only represent a landmark in the history of modern literary thought but are also a vital episode in the intellectual development of Proust himself — without them, our understanding of A la recherche du temps perdu would be incomplete. Truly outstanding are the critical essays that date from 1908, when Proust, aged thirty-seven, already felt that his life was drawing to a close and the urgency of writing his great masterpiece was fully upon him. Although these mostly accuse the then-famous critic Sainte-Beuve of being, among other things, an incompetent judge of Baudelaire, Stendhal, Flaubert and Balzac, collectively they make a robust statement of Proust's overriding aesthetic beliefs and concerns. Through them he defines the task of the artist as releasing the creative energies of past experiences from the hidden store of the unconscious — the aesthetic that was to lie at the heart of A la recherche du temps perdu.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penguin Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53809999806806,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/www.momoxbooks.com\/products\/marcel-proust-against-sainte-beuve-classics-9780140444971","provider":"momoxbooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}