Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) is a modern classic, arguably the most influential French novel of the twentieth century. This chapter examines its landmark status, its composition, structure and thematic preoccupations. It investigates why Proust’s novel stands apart from others produced contemporaneously and why its appeal endures to this day. Proust’s novel is shown to be a work characterized by plurality and multiplicity, an echo chamber of earlier works of art, and a vital staging post in the history of the novel. The reception of Proust's novel is considered, together with its place in the development of European modernism. Its long gestation and piecemeal publication are discussed and related to contemporary publications and the ways in which Proust adapted his novel and its architecture to the events—geopolitical and personal—that occurred during this time. The chapter examines the demands made of Proust’s readers by his narrative techniques and the strategies we develop to cope with the scale and ambition of his novel. It closes with a reflection on the ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first century French novelists have responded to Proust’s achievements.

The present volume provides a wide-ranging history of the novel in French from the fourteenth century to the present, illuminating and offering readers routes through a varied landscape while comparison and connection making between writers, works and historical periods. It does so via accessible accounts of how novelists writing in French have responded to the diverse economic, socio-political, cultural-artistic and environmental factors that shaped the world in which they found themselves. The editor’s introduction outlines the existing scholarship and provides a summary account of the structuring and approach taken in the volume (a history of the novel in French, rather than of the French novel). It then gives an overview of the five sections into which the volume is divided: ‘Beginnings’; ‘The Eighteenth Century: Learning, Letters, Libertinage’; ‘After the Revolution: the novel in the long nineteenth century’; ‘From Naturalism to the nouveau roman’; and ‘Fictions of the Fifth Republic: from de Gaulle to the Internet Age’. Echoes, imbrications and cross-references across and between these sections serve as reminders of the artificiality of the cut-and-dried, linear periodizing approach of much literary history.

Why do hosts vary so much in parasite burden, how does this variation translate to variation in host demographic rates and parasite transmission, and how does varied transmission intensity impact selection upon immune defence of individuals? The theoretical foundations of disease ecology provide predictions for the answers to these questions, yet testing such predictions with empirical data poses many challenges. We show how the long-term ecological and genetic study of the unmanaged Soay sheep of St Kilda has addressed fundamental questions in disease ecology, with longitudinal data on parasite burden, immune defence, condition, survival, and fecundity of >10,000 individuals. The rich individual-scale data are complemented by >30 years of data on sheep population dynamics and genetic diversity as well as parasite dynamics and diversity. Population-scale work has documented the range of parasite species present and the contribution of the most prevalent and virulent parasites to regulating sheep dynamics. Individual-scale work has identified drivers of variation in parasite burden and tested hypotheses about costs and benefits of defence in a quest to determine how natural selection has shaped immune function of the sheep.