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This critical study focusing exclusively on Annie Ernaux's writing trajectory provides an analysis of her individual texts. Following a broadly feminist hermeneutic, it engages in a series of close readings of Ernaux's works in a move to highlight the contradictions and nuances in her writing, and to demonstrate the intellectual intricacies of her literary project. By so doing, the study seeks to introduce new readers to Ernaux's works, while engaging on less-familiar terrain those already familiar with her writing.

Beyond Return examines how popular literary forms have been politicized or could be productively repoliticized in the literary period that we have called the contemporary (roughly: since 1980). In the aftermath of the efflorescence of experimental literature and theory that characterized the Trente Glorieuses (1945-75), ‘contemporary’ French literature is often said to embrace more traditional or readable novelistic forms. This rejection of the radical aesthetics of mid-century French literature, this rehabilitation of fictional forms that have been called sub-literary, regressive, or outdated, has been given a name: the ‘return to the story.’ Beyond Return proposes new perspectives on the cultural politics of such fictions. Examining adventure novels, radical noir, postmodernist mysteries, war novels, and dystopian fictions, this book shows how authors like Jean Echenoz, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean Rouaud, and Antoine Volodine develop radically dissimilar notions of the aesthetics of ‘return,’ and thus redraw in different manners the boundaries of the contemporary, the French, and the literary. In the process, Beyond Return argues for the need to move beyond the nostalgic, anti-modernist rhetoric of the ‘return to the story’ in order to appreciate the potentialities of innovative contemporary genre fictions.

The most successful female writer from Francophone Africa, Calixthe Beyala occupies an unusual place in French literary and popular culture. Her novels are bestsellers and she appears regularly on French television, yet a conviction for plagiarism has tarnished her reputation. Thus, she is both an ‘authentic’ African author and a proven literary ‘fake’. This book considers representations of Beyala in the media, critical responses to her writing, and Beyala's efforts to position herself as a champion of women's rights. The book pays equal attention to Beyala's novels, tracing their explorations of the role of migration in the creation of personal identity.

This book celebrates the work of the French Nobel prize-winning novelist Claude Simon. Scholars from France, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom reconsider the fifty years of Simon's fiction in the light of his large-scale autobiographical novel ‘Le Jardin des Plantes’ (1997). From a variety of perspectives — postmodernist, psychoanalytic, aesthetic — chapters reflect on the central paradox of Simon's work: his writing and rewriting of an experience of war so disruptive and traumatic that words can never be adequate to communicate it. The layers of artifice in ‘Le Jardin des Plantes’ and the nature of Simon's aesthetic are analyzed in chapters which explore intertextual resonances between Simon and Proust, Flaubert, Borges and Poussin. A complementary view of Simon's ‘Photographies 1937–1970’ shows that it too can be seen as form of indirect autobiography.

"The Colonial Fortune" highlights the features of a paracolonial aesthetics emanating from a significant body of contemporary Hexagonal and non-metropolitan texts. Authored by writers who are either directly involved in the debate about the colonial past and its remanence (J. M. G. Le Clézio, Paule Constant, Édouard Glissant, Tierno Monénembo, Marie NDiaye, and Leïla Sebbar) or who do not overtly manifest such concerns (Stéphane Audeguy, Marie Darrieussecq, Régis Jauffret, Pierre Michon, and Claude Simon), these works create a shared imaginary space permeated by the symbolic, rhetorical, and conceptual presence of colonialism in our postcolonial era. The paracolonial describes the phenomena of revival, resurgence, remanence, and residue – in other words, the permanence of the colonial in contemporary imagination. It also addresses the re-imagining, revisiting, and recasting of the colonial in current works of literature (fiction, autobiography, and essay). The idea of the colonial fortune emerges as an interface between our era’s concerns with issues of fate, economics, legacy, and debt stemming from the understudied persistence of the colonial in today’s political and cultural conversation, and literature’s ways of making sense of them both sensorially and sensibly.

At a time when the world is contemplating the depletion of non-renewable natural resources, the consumer society is increasingly being called into question. This is nowhere more acutely evident than in France, where since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, the consumer revolution, extending market forces into every area of social and private life, has been perceived as a challenge to core elements in French culture, such as traditional artisan crafts and small businesses serving local communities. Cultural historians and sociologists have charted the increasing commercialisation of everyday life over the twentieth century, but few have paid systematic attention to the crucial testimony provided by the authors of narrative fiction. This book rectifies this omission by means of close readings of a series of novels, selected for their authentic portrayal of consumer behaviour, and analysed in relation to their social, cultural and historical contexts.

The Culture of War explores the unexpected flourishing of literature both high and low during the Siege of Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871. When Prussian forces completely blockaded Paris, isolating the city from the outside world, Parisians turned to literature to resist the enemy, to fill the idle hours under siege, and to articulate their place in history. This cultural boom was a conscious effort on the part of literary institutions like newspapers, publishers, and theaters to ensure the viability of their industries during a period of political uncertainty. To do so, many publishers, editors, and directors sought legitimacy through populism, promoting literature written by anonymous and unknown authors or that spoke to populist ideas. A study of national tragedy on a local scale, The Culture of War goes beyond traditional narratives of communal or individual psychology, and studies institutional responses to financial and political instability, viewing literature as a product of economic and political forces.

In the wake of the Second World War, ideas of Europe abounded. What did Europe mean as a concept, and what did it mean to be European? Europeanising Spaces in Paris, c. 1947-1962 makes the case that Paris was both a leading and distinctive forum for the expression of these ideas in the post-war period. It examines urban, political and cultural spaces in the French capital in which ideas about Europe were formulated, articulated, exchanged, circulated, and contested during this post-war period, roughly between the escalation of the Cold War and the end of France's war of decolonisation in Algeria. The Parisian café, home and street are each examined in terms of how they were implicated in ideas about Europe. Then, the Paris-based Mouvement socialiste des états unis d'Europe (The Socialist Movement for the United States of Europe) and the far-right wing Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (The Federation of Nationalist Students) are examined as examples of political movements that mobilised around–very different–concepts of Europe. The final section on cultural Europeanising spaces draws attention to the specificities of the Europeanism of exiles from Franco's Spain in Paris; the work of the great scholar of the Arab world, Jacques Berque, in the context of his understanding of the Mediterranean world; and finally, the work of the legendary photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, by looking at the capacities and limitations of the photographic medium for the representation of Europe, and how these corresponded with Cartier-Bresson’s commitments.

This is the first full-length study to cover the complete texts of Hervé Guibert (1955–1991), offering a thorough documentation of his literary output. The book is guided by Guibert's relation to the novel, a major line of enquiry throughout, as well as his experimentation with voices in particular. One of the author's main contentions is that Guibert arrives at the creation of a new literary genre, the roman faux, with the publication of his best-known work To the Friend who did not save my life. The book ends by considering the works Guibert produced after he was diagnosed as HIV positive, within the parameter of the voices of the self.

This book draws attention to the existence in France of an AIDS literature from 1985 to 1988 before AIDS writing became either a widely recognized genre or a culturally influential form of writing. It is a predominantly literary critical study, informed by gender studies and psychoanalytic criticism in its readings of individual texts, and interwoven with contextual information.

This book revisits a critical paradigm that has often been overlooked or dismissed by science fiction scholars - namely, that science fiction can be understood in terms of myth. For the purposes of this study, ‘myth’ is defined as an explanatory narrative, and this book builds upon the theory that myth is functionally similar to science: both are concerned with filling in ‘gaps’ in what is known, though the former fills those gaps with cultural logics (or ‘common sense’) while the latter uses testable hypotheses. Science fiction springs from pseudo-science rather than ‘proper’ science, because pseudo-science is more easily converted into narrative; in this book it is argued that different cultures produce distinct pseudo-sciences, and thus, unique science fiction traditions. This framework is used to examine Irish science fiction from the 1850s to the present day, covering material written both in Irish and in English. The author considers science fiction novels and short stories in their historical context, analysing a body of literature that has largely been ignored by Irish literature researchers. This is the first book to focus exclusively on Irish science fiction, and the first to consider Irish-language stories and novels alongside works published in English.

Juan Goytisolo is arguably Spain's foremost contemporary novelist. This book is one of the few major studies in English to examine all of his mature works, from ‘Senas de identidad’ in 1966 to ‘Las semanas del jardin’, published in 1997. It focuses on the interface between the thematic content of the novels and its formal expression, viewing this as the crucial nexus of their meaning. Goytisolo's writing is, in his own words, a ‘commitment of myself … for a transformation of the world.’ This book dissects the nature of the relationship between writer and reader to show how Goytisolo's political commitment is reflected in his work.

Eating and drinking are essential to survival. Yet for human animals, they are ambivalent, proliferating with ideological, historical and psychological leftovers. This study reveals and mobilizes the provisional meanings, repressed experiences and unacknowledged tensions bound up with representations of food, drink and their consumption. It creates a flexible critical framework by bringing together an unexploited convergence of post-war French thinkers who use – or whose thought is legible through – figures of eating and drinking, including Barthes, Bataille, Beauvoir, Bourdieu, Certeau, Cixous, Derrida, Fischler, Giard, Kristeva, Lacan, Lefebvre, Lévi-Strauss, Mayol and Sartre. New combinations emerge for elucidating the intersecting effects of: incorporation; constructs of class, gender and racial difference; bad faith; distinction; secondary ideological signifying systems; provisional meanings bound up with linguistic traces; economies of excess; everyday ‘making-do’; the ethics of consuming the other; the return of the repressed; lack; abjection; notions of ‘eating on the sly’, ‘mother’s milk’, the ‘omnivore’s paradox’ and ‘gastro-anomie’. Possibilities for re-thinking with eating and drinking are further exemplified in cases studies of novels in which – often beyond authorial intentions – food and drink are structurally important and interpretatively plural: Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes/The Erasers (1953); Ernaux’s Les Armoires vides/Cleaned Out (1974); Darrieussecq’s Truismes/Pig Tales (1996); and Houellebecq’sLa Carte et le territoire/The Map and the Territory (2010). New understandings of post-war French cultural production are revealed. But above all, the analyses demonstrate the potential – across genres, periods and places – for literary, comparative, cultural, film, gender and food studies of re-thinking with eating and drinking.

Lemography is a unique collection of critical essays on Stanislaw Lem, writer and philosopher hailed on more than one occasion as a literary Einstein. Its aim is to introduce aspects of his work hitherto unknown or neglected by scholarship and evaluate his influence on twentieth-century literature and culture—and beyond. The book’s uniqueness is enhanced by the global makeup of the contributors who hail from Canada, United States, Great Britain, Belorussia, Poland, Croatia, Finland, and Hong Kong. In all cases, these are scholars and translators who for many years have pursued, and in some cases defined, Lem scholarship. Rather than study Lem as a science fiction writer, each essay commands a wider sphere of reference in order to appraise Lem’s literary and philosophical contributions (the ‘philosophy of the future’). Each focuses on a different novel or a set of novels, examining them critically—i.e. with a view to his strengths and weaknesses. Between them, the essays shed light on virtually all phases of Lem’s multidimensional career, from his very first novel Man from Mars right down to the farewell Peace on Earth. In the process, Lemography marks several ‘firsts’ in English: the first overview of Lem’s life and work against the background of political events in postwar Poland; first-time translations from and critical assessments of Lem’s first three novels; a comprehensive analysis of Lem’s best known novel in the context of all of its cinematic adaptations; a sustained critique of Lem as a pioneer of futurology; a critical introduction to Lem’s supercomputer; and a comparative discussion of the last two novels he ever wrote.

In English-speaking countries, Francophone comic strips like Herges' ‘Les Aventures de Tin Tin’ and Goscinny and Uderzo's ‘Les Aventures d'Asterix’ are viewed — and marketed — as children's literature. But in Belgium and France, their respective countries of origin, such strips — known as bandes dessinées — are considered a genuine art form, or, more specifically, ‘the ninth art’. But what accounts for the drastic difference in the way such comics are received? This book explores that difference in the reception and reputation of bandes dessinées. Along with in-depth looks at Tintin and Asterix, the book considers other major comics artists such as Jacque Tardi, Jean Giraud and Moebius, assessing in the process their role in Francophone literary and artistic culture.

Michel Tournier is a writer who explores complex philosophical questions in the guise of concrete, imagistic narratives. This comprehensive study privileges the notion of literary reference, by which the world of text is understood or experienced in metaphorical relation to the world outside of it. Metaphor, in the context of Tournier's fiction, shows how the fantastic merges with the real to provide new perspectives on many diverse aspects of the modern world: the Crusoe myth, Nazism, the value to society of art and religion, and the nature of education. This book elucidates an aesthetic of Tournier's fiction that encompasses the writer's stated ambition to go beyond literature.

This book is a study of aspects of 1890s French literature, with specific reference to the traditions of Symbolism and Decadence. Its main focus is Alfred Jarry, who has proved, perhaps surprisingly, to be one of the more durable fin–de–siècle authors. The originality of this study lies in its use of the enigmatic list of books termed the livres pairs, which appears in Jarry's 1898 novel Gestes et Opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, his best–known prose work. The greatest interest of the livres pairs lies in a group of works by Jarry's friends and contemporaries, primarily Leon Bloy, Georges Darien, Gustave Kahn, Catulle Mendes, Josephin Madan, Rachilde, and Henri de Regnier. Several of these authors feature as the lords of islands visited by the pataphysician Dr Faustroll in his curious voyage around Paris. In conjunction with Jarry's own works, the contemporary livres pairs serve to illustrate the vibrant and experimental atmosphere in which these authors worked.