This volume of edited essays is the first one in English to offer a critical overview of the specific features of Belgian modernity from 1880 to 1940 in a multiplicity of disciplines: literature and poetry, politics, music, photography and drama. The first half of the book investigates the roots of twentieth century modernity in Belgian fin de sicle across a variety of genres (novel, poetry and drama), not only within but also beyond the boundaries of Symbolism. The contributors go on to examine the explosion of Belgian culture on the international scene with the rise of the avant-gardes, notably Surrealism: and the contribution made in minor genres, such as the popular novels of Simenon and Jean Ray, and the Tintin comics of Herg.

Proust and the Visual is an edited volume of essays written by Proustian specialists, concerned with a rich phenomenological category, the "visual" whose prominent role in the novel is at the heart of its modernity. The "visual" is defined as manifesting in the image not only space, but also time. The "visual" is considered as a category that delineates the conditions of possibility of all visibility and constitutes an integral part of both the progression of the narrator's journey towards becoming a writer and of the unfolding of the novel itself.

The relationship between Marcel Proust and John Ruskin has always attracted interest. However, the influence of the English art critic was seen essentially in terms of cultural inputs. At the same time, as a translator, Proust was not taken seriously: 'Au fond vous ne savez pas l'anglais et cela doit etre plein de contresens' said to him the Prince de Brancovan. Proust's irate response was that perhaps he didn't know the English language, but he profoundly knew his Ruskin. In fact, his translations were unanimously well received. In her original work, Nathalie Aubert demonstrates that the reason why Proust embarked on his translations was that he had experienced the inadequacy of his own language, forcing him to abandon his first novel. She shows that the obscurity of Ruskin's text helped him to establish in La Recherche a constant tension between insignificance and meaning. Informed by phenomenology, she points out that this tension is a temporal process, due to the complexity of the Visual and that the structural link between translation and metaphor is a bridge between text and reality via the Visual.