As several contributors to this volume have indicated, the modern French novel has shown a particularly strong capacity for questioning and redefining itself. This dynamic of constant self-renewal expresses the broader vitality of modernism at large, understood as a general ethos informing a variety of artistic movements since the 1880s, all bent on expanding, and in some cases exploding, a space of representation deemed to be unduly monopolised by codes inherited from the past. In the modern novel, as in the visual arts, the main codes under attack are those sustained by the orthodoxy of classical nineteenth-century realism, with the attack itself often being justified in the name of a 'higher' form of the same basic mimetic urge, such as 'psychological' realism, which prioritises the inner world of human subjectivity, or 'phenomenological' realism, which tracks the outer world as physically experienced by a human subject. Modernism, then, is characterised by a strongly felt need to effect a break with the past, which in turn generates a search, often conducted in an experimental spirit, for new forms and modes of artistic expression. In the twentieth century, this modernist logic of rupture and renewal, central to the very concept of an 'avant-garde', provides the framework within which most theorising about the novel has taken place.