The publication of À la recherche du temps perdu 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 a thousand years. Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia 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 – 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 Recherche – while his probing analysis of human nature and relationships evokes the nineteenth-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 Essais and Pascal's Pensées while heralding the heightened self-reflexivity that characterizes modernist and postmodern fiction. Just how indebted the Recherche is to its literary predecessors and how readily its author engages in intertextual games and pastiches can be gleaned from the extensive literary references in the text, ranging from Homer, Saint-Simon and Racine to George Eliot, Balzac and Dostoyevsky. Proust's quasi-encyclopaedic knowledge of western literature across the ages and his subtlety and flair as a literary critic have enriched and nourished his novel, endowing it with an intertextual and generic complexity matched perhaps only by his fellow modernist James Joyce. As Jean-Yves Tadié comments, ‘À la recherche recapitulates the entire literary tradition, from the Bible to Flaubert and Tolstoy, and all literary genres.’