French Fiction into the Twenty-First Century

This book explores the current state of French fiction through an examination of the work of five major French writers, viewed in the wider context of the current French literary scene. It evaluates the widely held, but little analyzed, notion that there has been a return to more conventional storytelling in the wake of an experimental period in French literary fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. The book deals with some of the most widely-studied writers on British and American university French courses in an accessible style, while offering a new perspective on recent trends in the French novel and entering forthrightly into current debates on narrative theory. The aims of the study are three-fold. Firstly, it examines in detail the work of five notable contemporary writers, namely Annie Ernaux, Pascal Quignard, Marie Darrieussecq, Jean Echenoz and Patrick Modiano. It uncovers the characteristics and uses of narrative form in these novelists' work, exploring the relationship between form and subject-matter, and comparing their practice to that of mid-twentieth-century experimentalists.Secondly, the study inserts its writers into the broader context of turn-of-the-century French writing, from Amelie Nothomb and Daniel Pennac to Francois Bon and Marie NDiaye. Finally, the project's focus on narrative form allows it a more significant scope over the fiction of the period than other, less clearly defined studies have achieved.