Margaret Topping – författare

Proust's Gods explores two interweaving networks of imagery which are vital to key thematic areas of Proust's fictional construct. These are Christian and biblical, and classical and mythological figures of speech. Proust's metaphorical vision plucks legends and figures drawn from these sources out of their original settings and thrusts them with all their persistent resonances into new and often unlikely contexts. Yet these deliberately incongruous juxtapositions and the sliding scale of tones they produce are also strangely apt, and amongst the richest sources of humorous effects in the novel. The study also analyses the increasing sophistication of Proust's imagery from his earliest writings onwards, and re-evaluates the role of the largely-ignored Correspondance in his development as a writer. Considered as texts rather than biographical documents, the letters are identified as a flexible stylistic 'stamping ground' and an arena for experimentation for later works.

Provides a detailed analysis of intertextual sources from the perspective of the metaphorical re-writings which they undergo in Proust's writing. The author re-evaluates the broader role within the novel of images, which tend to be viewed as isolated rather than as essential parts of a coherent network.

This book explores how the Humanities can play an essential services role in addressing global challenges such as the Covid pandemic. In arguing for their contribution alongside that of the Health Sciences, it calls for a new critical engagement – honest and self-reflective – from Humanities scholars with the question of how to overcome a fundamental challenge facing universities globally: finding a common language and set of ‘cultural’ assumptions between disciplines as the basis for communication. The book looks at the nature of the challenges that can beset collaboration across disciplines (and indeed across sectors, notably between researchers and the general public) and argues for a new Translational Humanities, in both the sense of an applied Humanities and a Humanities that can translate itself across disciplines and sectors. Crucially, too, it suggests that it is not narratives such as a pandemic novel or contagion film that successfully engage with contentious debates about the challenges of Covid, but rather critically distant texts and thematic contexts that typically place the self in the position of other like travel narratives. This book sits at a previously unconsidered intersection between debates around interdisciplinary collaboration and communication, theories of intercultural contact and encounter, and the role of the Humanities in tackling global issues.