First published in 1990, Carol Colatrella’s work Evolution, Sacrifice, and Narrative: Balzac, Zola, and Faulkner focuses on the “first” novels in each author’s series (La Père Goriot, La Fortune des Rougon, and Flags in the Dust) and considers how each novel relates to its series and derives a definition of the naturalistic roman-fleuve. To describe this development, the issues of how a scientific idea becomes refracted in a literary genre and how the naturalistic novel developed out of the realistic novel are considered.