French Literature Reviews - 2026
B. Mahuzier, Proust et la guerre
Novel and Narrative Prose
Review published in Acta Fabula (February-March 2015, vol. 16, no. 2): "Proust, écrivain de la guerre" by Stéphane Massonet.
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Brigitte Mahuzier, Proust et la guerre
Paris: Honoré Champion, coll. "Recherches proustiennes", 2014.
EAN 9782745326423
192 p.
Price 38EUR
Publisher's overview:
À la recherche du temps perdu was largely written and rewritten during and immediately after the First World War. If the novel attained the scope we know today, it is directly due to the War, which suspended the publication of the two volumes intended to follow Du côté de chez Swann. Yet Proust is rarely regarded as a writer of the Great War—not because he fails to mention it, but because he approaches it from the home front: a despised space populated by women, children, the elderly, the disabled, homosexuals, and draft dodgers. This study sets out to demonstrate that, despite—or, to use his formula subverting causality, because of—his status as a writer rooted in the home front, Proust belongs to those authors whose writing is profoundly shaped by a war from which he managed, like a master strategist, to draw undeniable artistic benefits throughout the creation of his masterpiece.
Brigitte Mahuzier, professor of French language, civilization, and literature in the United States at Bryn Mawr College, specializes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her recent research and publications focus on authors whose works have been marked by wars and conflicts during the "long nineteenth century." She is currently completing a book on the imaginary of the glorious defeat, from Waterloo to Verdun.
The First World War profoundly disrupted French literary production and intellectual life, transforming the themes and publication histories of numerous modern masterpieces. While many canonical writers focused directly on the horrors of the trenches and the battlefields of the Western Front, others observed the immense social and psychological upheavals from behind the lines. This rear-guard perspective captured a society reshaped by absence, civilian anxiety, and wartime mobilization, offering a distinct vantage point on the era's collective trauma. Scholars of modern French literature continue to examine how these domestic spaces reflected the broader fractures of wartime Europe.
Brigitte Mahuzier, professor of French language, civilization, and literature at Bryn Mawr College, examines the intersection of modernist fiction and armed conflict during the early twentieth century, focusing on the domestic and rear-guard spaces depicted in À la recherche du temps perdu. The study addresses how Marcel Proust engaged with the wartime environment from the home front, a space populated by women, children, the elderly, the disabled, homosexuals, and draft dodgers. Readers interested in twentieth-century French fiction and modernist studies may find this analysis relevant to their understanding of wartime literature.