Ekphrasis, Memory and Narrative after Proust: Prose Pictures and Fictional Recollection

Exploring the relationship between ekphrasis, memory and narrative in modern and contemporary fiction after Proust, this book considers how Vladimir Nabokov, W.G. Sebald, Lydia Davis, Ali Smith and Ben Lerner have all variously employed and reshaped Proust’s way of depicting memory in their fiction.
There is critical consensus that the novel is undergoing a ‘visual turn’, but most discussions of the image-in-text focus either on the image as plot device or on the meaning surplus made possible by the citation of other media within a literary text. This book adds to scholarship in the area, arguing that ekphrasis performs another, underexplored function, serving the needs of recollection and acting as the site where memory and forgetting, absence and presence, self and other, image and text ceaselessly contest each other.