<P> There is much debate as to how great a bearing Proust's sexuality has on understanding these aspects of the novel . Although many of Proust's close family and friends suspected that he was homosexual, Proust never admitted this . It was only after his death that André Gide, in his publication of correspondence with Proust, made public Proust's homosexuality . In response to Gide's criticism that he hid his actual sexuality within his novel, Proust told Gide that "one can say anything so long as one does not say' I' ." The nature of Proust's intimate relations with such individuals as Alfred Agostinelli and Reynaldo Hahn are well documented, though Proust was not "out and proud," except perhaps in close - knit social circles . In 1949, the critic Justin O'Brien published an article in the PMLA called "Albertine the Ambiguous: Notes on Proust's Transposition of Sexes" which proposed that some female characters are best understood as actually referring to young men . Strip off the feminine ending of the names of the Narrator's lovers--Albertine, Gilberte, Andrée--and one has their masculine counterpart . This theory has become known as the "transposition of sexes theory" in Proust criticism, which in turn has been challenged in Epistemology of the Closet (1990) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and in "Proust's Lesbianism" (1999) by Elisabeth Ladenson . Feminized forms of masculine names were and are commonplace in French . </P> <P> It is considered, by many scholars and critics, to be the definitive modern novel . It has had a profound effect on subsequent writers such as the Bloomsbury Group . "Oh if I could write like that!" marveled Virginia Woolf in 1922 (2: 525). </P> <P> Literary critic Harold Bloom wrote that In Search of Lost Time is now "widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century ." Vladimir Nabokov, in a 1965 interview, named the greatest prose works of the 20th century as, in order, "Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Bely's Petersburg, and the first half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time ." J. Peder Zane's book The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, collates 125 "top 10 greatest books of all time" lists by prominent living writers; In Search of Lost Time is placed eighth . In the 1960s, Swedish literary critic Bengt Holmqvist described the novel as "at once the last great classic of French epic prose tradition and the towering precursor of the' nouveau roman"', indicating the sixties vogue of new, experimental French prose but also, by extension, other post-war attempts to fuse different planes of location, temporality and fragmented consciousness within the same novel . Pulitzer Prize - winning author Michael Chabon has called it his favorite book . </P> <P> Proust's influence (in parody) is seen in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust (1934), in which Chapter 1 is entitled "Du Côté de Chez Beaver" and Chapter 6 "Du Côté de Chez Tod ." Waugh did not like Proust: in letters to Nancy Mitford in 1948, he wrote, "I am reading Proust for the first time...and am surprised to find him a mental defective" and later, "I still think (Proust) insane...the structure must be sane & that is raving ." </P>

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