Focussing on the experience of work, community and the functioning of class society; on relations between France and Algeria and France's wider colonial project; and on creative labour as both artisanal and artistic, contributors to {i}Labours of Attention{/i} follow paths opened up by the scholarship of Edward J. Hughes. Via critical engagements with the works of Albert Camus and Marcel Proust, as well as with a wider constellation of writers (including Pierre Michon, Jean Genet, Simone de Beauvoir, Blaise Cendrars), artists (including Vincent Van Gogh, Fernand Léger and Paul Cézanne) and film-makers (including Alain Resnais, Yacine Balah and Paolo Sorrentino) this collection of essays explores how these themes and critical preoccupations are captured, problematized and negotiated by twentieth-century literary writing and cultural production in French. Adam Watt is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter.