Inspired by the work of their colleague David Gascoigne, a group of scholars from the UK and France examine in this book the narrative strategies of some of the most interesting and important French writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Stretching chronologically from 1905 to 2005, the volume examines a wide variety of prose genres, from pornography to Bildungsroman to magic realism, as well as poetry. Michel Tournier figures in several of the contributions, emerging as something of a touchstone for many of the thematic preoccupations that are common throughout the period: values and authority, self and other, identity, spirituality, migration and exile, sexuality, the body, violence and war, and language. The authors also examine the flourishing of intertextuality, as well as the use of traditional forms, such as mythical structures and the ‘robinsonade’, to undermine authoritative ‘métarécits’. Probing these themes and forms, and their metamorphoses across 100 years, the essays demonstrate a striking degree of continuity, linking writers as different as Apollinaire and Houellebecq or Valéry and Fleutiaux, and highlight the difficulty of dividing the period neatly into chronologically ordered categories labelled ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’.

Lorna Milne is Professor of French at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of monographs on Michel Tournier and Patrick Chamoiseau, and works on modern and contemporary literature from metropolitan France and the Caribbean. Mary Orr is Professor of French at the University of Southampton. Her most recent monographs are (2003) and (2008). She is currently working on the place and roles of women in early nineteenth-century European natural science and its writing.

«(...) the volume is not only a fine tribute to Gascoigne’s work but also an important contribution to the current re-evaluation of twentieth-century French literary history, including the categories of modernism and postmodernism, and to our understanding of contemporary literature. In particular, by delineating what the editors call an ‘aesthetic of ongoing connection’ (p. 27), it provides valuable insights into the ongoing discussion on how to understand, after the heyday of the ‘nouveau roman’, the apparent return to old forms and the creative reuse of such forms in new contexts.» (Hanna Meretoja, French Studies 66, 2012/2)

Contents: Lorna Milne/Mary Orr: Introduction – Ian Higgins: A Void to Avoid a Void – Peter Read: Apollinaire’s Voluptuous Calvary: Lexical Fields, Generic Conventions and Narrative Space in Michael Tilby: Céline, Invective and the Dismantling of Narrative: Michael Kelly: Mounier Multivocalist: Towards a Multiple Articulation of the French Experience of Black Africa – Robin MacKenzie: The Rhetoric of the Border in Julien Gracq’s Alan Morris: The of Doctor Lamballe and Mister Swing Troubadour: Echoes of Vidocq and Robert Louis Stevenson in Patrick Modiano’s Anne Chevalier : L’Enfance perturbe et fertilise le récit dans la littérature française du vingtième siècle : l’exemple de Chamoiseau – David Evans: ‘On transporte avec soi une espèce de gouffre’: Textual Spaces and Literary Heritage in Michel Houellebecq’s Mairi Maclean: Tournier and his Intellectual Milieu: Narratives of Modernity – Paul Gifford: Footprint in the Sand: Tournier’s Re-Writing of Paul Valéry in Susan Bainbrigge: ‘Terre d’asile, terre d’accueil’: Explorations of the Robinsonade in Pierre Mertens’s Mary Orr: The Metamorphoses of Forms in Tournier’s and Pierrette Fleutiaux’s Lorna Milne: Deep Space: A Sojourn in the Salt Mines with Michel Tournier and Marie Nimier – Alain Goulet : Les Nuits de Sylvie Germain et le pari de Pascal – Toby Garfitt: Sylvie Germain: Fable, , Echolalia – Margaret-Anne Hutton: Is France Post Post-War? Judging the Nazi Past in Recent Novels by Maud Tabachnik, Michel Rio and Sylvie Germain – David Gascoigne: Publications. Inhaltsverzeichnis