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'.
"(...) 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)