Appetizing epistolarity The dedication of copies

Proust was not especially inclined to sign dedications in his books, but he did dedicate a good number of them judging by the bounty of handwritten dedications that can be gleaned from his Correspondance générale and his biographies. In Proust’s hands, this peritextual genre underwent powerful metamorphoses that pushed it in the direction of a preface or a missive. Textual linguistics and pragmatics allow us to reveal the dynamics of these dedications and the stakes in terms of speech acts and facework.