Alongside ground-breaking works by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust's seven-volume À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), published between 1913 and 1927, is universally recognised as one of the masterpieces of European modernism, a milestone in the study of human consciousness and a revolution in the history of prose writing. Written over more than a decade and brought to a close only by the author's death (the last three volumes were published posthumously), it is a work of formidable complexity, not only in its meandering, sinuous style and digressive, often chronology-defying narrative, but, above all, in the radically new vision it proposes of individuals in time and its quasi encyclopedic engagement with the most diverse forms of human experience and knowledge. Characteristically ‘in-between centuries’ in terms of the culture and the literary imaginary that have shaped it, À la recherche serves as a bridge between the nascent forms of modernism found in the work of predecessors such as Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire and the high modernism that was to challenge traditional genre conventions in the period between the two world wars. Though anchored in the nineteenth century, Proust is also a contemporary of Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso, a writer whose thinking was indelibly shaped by the artistic and technological revolutions of modernity and who, in turn, contributed to the new understanding of the world and the self that emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century.