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The chapters in this book respond to important questions about the formal properties of French literary texts and the agency of form. A central feature of twentieth- and twenty-first century French and Francophone writing has been the exploration of how cultural forms (literary, philosophical and visual) create distinctive semiotic environments and at the same time engage with external realities. The aim of this volume is to explore how the formal properties of a range of texts inflect our reading of them and, through that exploration, to renew the engagement with form that has been a key feature of French cultural production and of analysis in French studies.

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French literature, this rehabilitation of fictional forms that have been called sub-literary, regressive, or outdated, has been given a name: the ‘return to the story.’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.

Being Contemporary emerges from a sense of critical urgency to probe the notion of ‘the contemporary’, and the place of the contemporary critic, in French literary and cultural studies today. Consisting of twenty-two critical essays written by scholars in the field of French studies, the volume offers a sustained reflection on the status of the contemporary in French culture and takes a close look at the contemporary moment itself, as well as its concomitant discourse of crisis. The volume is split into four sections. The first section, ‘Conceptualizing the Contemporary’, offers distinct disciplinary approaches to broader questions about time, period, and categorization. The second section, ‘Contemporary Politics and French Thought’, brings broader theoretical inquiries to bear on the political sphere. The third section, ‘The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives’, rearticulates the concern that the difficult negotiation of the past continues to haunt the present. The fourth section, ‘Writing the Contemporary Self’, features essays that probe the limits of autobiographical writing and self-representation. The fifth section, ‘Novel Rereadings’, offers new interpretations of monumental works of French fiction by literary giants such as Flaubert, Colette, Proust, Beckett. The sixth and final section, ‘Memory: Past and Future’, concludes with three different approaches to memory and representation. The essays in this volume, organised by theme rather than by definitions or denotations, encourage an expansive and elastic theoretical framework that charts a broad conceptual course and attempts to define what it means to ‘be contemporary’ both broadly and in terms of practice.

Construction of identity has constituted a vigorous source of debate in the Caribbean from the early days of colonization to the present, and under the varying guises of independence, departmentalization, dictatorship, overseas collectivity and occupation. Given the strictures and structures of colonialism long imposed upon the colonized subject, the (re)makings of identity have proven anything but evident when it comes to determining authentic expressions and perceptions of the postcolonial self. By way of close readings of both constructions in literature and the construction of literature, Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean proposes an original, informative frame of reference for understanding the long and ever-evolving struggle for social, cultural, historical and political autonomy in the region. Taking as its point of focus diverse canonical and lesser-known texts from Guadeloupe, Martinique and Haiti published between 1958 and 2013, this book examines the trope of the house (architecture) and the meta-textual construction of texts (architexture) as a means of conceptualizing and articulating how authentic means of expression are and have been created in French-Caribbean literature over the greater part of the past half-century—whether it be in the context of the years leading up to or following the departmentalization of France’s overseas colonies in the 1940’s, the wrath of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, or the devastating Haiti earthquake of 2010.

Publishing Africa in French provides a critical analysis of the global dynamics and cultural and publishing history of French and African literature. It focuses on French readership and the French literary-political sphere, and engages with issues of authorial authenticity, literary value, and author autonomy. The study is built on careful documentations of the pre- and post-publication process, and explores the relentless interweaving of ideas expressed in literary form, their institutional contexts and underlying human relationships, and asks: Who writes about Africa and who is Africa written for? The book is split into two sections, ‘Institutions’ and ‘Mediations’. The first part of the book, ‘Institutions’, situates three institutions of particular significance, the publishing houses of Le Seuil and Présence Africaine, and the Association nationale des écrivains de la mer et de l’outre-mer. ‘Mediations’, the second section of the book, concludes with a consideration on how institutional structures work into or against the literary texture of selected publications, and examines readers’ reports and editorial revision; the use of pseudonyms; the development of named collections and the process of literary translation from English. Publishing Africa in French aims to bring book-historical principles to bear on a decisive period in French literary history and foregrounds the influencing factors on literary expression and its material impressions in the period of decolonization.

The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction seeks to better understand the concept of community as a central and problematic issue in French Caribbean literature. The study examines representations of community in seven French Caribbean novels, including Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée, Edouard Glissant’s Le Quatrième Siècle, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, Vincent Placoly’s L’Eau-de-mort guildive, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, Daniel Maximin’s L’Ile et une nuit, and Maryse Condé’s Desirada. Each novel is discussed in chronological order, demonstrating a progressive move away from the ‘closed’ community towards a newer sense of an ‘open’ community. In this study, Britton offers an understanding of the postcolonial societies of the Caribbean by looking at French Caribbean literature’s role in the creation of community. The seven novels analysed reveal a correlation between a tightly knit, purposeful community and a linear narrative that ends in definitive resolution, and, conversely, between a dispersed or heterogeneous community and a narrative structure that avoids linearity and closure.

Francophone Jewish Writers: Imagining Israel explores autobiographies, memoirs, and novels written by French-language Jewish writers in order to get an idea of Francophone Jewish imaginings of Israel. Cairns contextualises her analysis of the texts in this book by drawing on social and political history as well as ideas of philosophy, journalism, psychoanalysis and sociology. The book foregrounds the differing emotional investments in Israel coming from both Francophone Jews physically situated in Israel and from diasporic Jews in France, thus investigating the ‘special’ Jewish relationship between the two countries.

This study discusses how the ways in which Chamoiseau’s work attempts to recover (bring back) the memory of the past have contributed to a collective and individual coming to terms with, and, potentially, a recovery from its effects. In bringing the theme of memory to the forefront of her analysis, and in considering this highly memorial writing alongside work done in a wider context, McCusker generates insights which have resonance in the broader field of postcolonial literary studies. The first and last chapters focus on a single work, Chronique des sept misères and Biblique des derniers gestes respectively, with the chapters in-between counterpointing several texts, so as to suggest recurring and significant themes and issues on Chamoiseau’s literature.