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The publication of In Search of Lost Time between 1913 and 1927 constitutes both a summa of and a new departure for Western literature.

With its guiding theme of an artistic vocation, its sensitive portrayal of a sentimental education from childhood to maturity and its quest for deeper metaphysical truths beyond the confines of the material world, the novel aligns itself with a tradition of foundational texts that have shaped European literature for almost 1,000 years. Dante’s Divine Comedy with its allegory of a spiritual peregrination; the analytical novel in the tradition of Madame de Lafayette; the Bildungsroman in the style of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – not to forget the great Russian novel with its complex narrative construction and epic portraits of society – are but some of the models that resonate in Proust’s novel.

The author’s use of a first-person narrative, sharp characterization and satirical descriptions of upper-class society recall the Mémoires of Saint-Simon – a major influence on the Search – while his probing analysis of human nature and relationships evokes the 19th-century French personal novel of authors such as Benjamin Constant, Nerval and Chateaubriand.

The novel’s doubling up as a philosophical treatise and an aesthetic manifesto, finally, puts it in the lineage of essayistic works such as Montaigne’s Essays and Pascal’s Pensées while heralding the heightened self-reflexivity that characterizes modernist and postmodern fiction.