Romanesque, idéalisation et projection dans Du côté de chez Swann

The notion of the romanesque, often associated with third-rate novels at the end of the nineteenth century, is recharged in Proust with a positive dynamic associated with imagination and creativity. The romanesque possibly provides a key for reading In Search of Lost Time as a whole if one does not confine oneself to conceiving of it as a reservoir of dramatic turns or extraordinary events, or as the site of an idealization to be freed from.