Professor François Proulx and graduate students enrolled in the seminar “French 578: Marcel Proust” collaborated on the online exhibition Proust and the Great War.

Time Regained, the final volume of Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, is among the most famous literary depictions of World War I. Yet most of Proust’s letters from the war period have never been translated into English. Proust and his relations felt the effects of the war closely: their letters offer vivid testimony of their varied experiences, from the horrors of the front, to social and cultural life in Paris under the threat of bombardments.

Proust and the Great War  features the work of graduate students enrolled in the seminar “French 578: Marcel Proust” at the University of Illinois. Each student translated, annotated, and wrote an explicatory text about a letter or group of letters held at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. This exhibition, with a small selection and limited features, offers a glimpse of things to come in the forthcoming digital edition of Marcel Proust’s letters.

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