Contemporary Fiction in French

Anna-Louise Milne is Professor of French and Comparative Literature in the Department of French, International Politics and History at the University of London Institute in Paris. She is also the author of 75 (2016) and The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris (2013), and she has recently co-authored The New Internationalists (2020) on the politics of contemporary solidarity. Russell Williams Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and English at The American University of Paris. He is the author of Pathos, Poetry and Politics in Michel Houellebecq's Fiction (2020), and he writes regularly for publications including the Times Literary Supplement and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

• Introduction: Mapping the contemporary Anna-Louise Milne and Russell Williams; 1. Mediterranean francophone writing Edwige Tamalet Talbayev; 2. After the experiment Simon Kemp; 3. Getting a future: Fiction and social reproduction Anna-Louise Milne; 4. Contemporary French fiction and the world: Transnationalism, translingualism and the limits of genre Charles Forsdick; 5. The Franco-American novel Russell Williams; 6. Graphic novel revolution(s) Laurence Grove; 7. 'Back in the USSR': The prose of Andreï Makine and Antoine Volodine Helena Duffy; 8. Fictions of self Shirley Jordan; 9. Trauma, transmission, repression Maxim Silverman; 10. Wretched of the Sea: Boat people and narratives of displacement Subha Xavier; 11. Urban Dystopias Gillian Jein; 12. Imagining civil war in the contemporary French novel Martin Crowley.

'… reading the twelve essays in this collection is like taking a trip into the unknown, or to a recently discovered land, with an expert as guide … Each essay, written by an international scholar, gives life to the complex temporal and spatial dynamics of contemporary fiction … Essential.' C. B. Kerr, CHOICE