Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990

Readers of the contemporary novel in France are witnessing the most astonishing reinvigoration of French narrative prose since the New Novel of the 1950s. In the last few years, bold, innovative, and richly compelling novels have been written by a variety of young writers. These texts question traditional strategies of character, plot, theme, and message; and they demand new strategies of reading, too. Choosing ten novels published during the 1990s as examples of that trend, Warren Motte traces the resurgence of the novel in France. He argues that each of the novels under consideration, quite apart from what other story it tells, presents a fable of the novel that deals with the genre's possibilities, limitations, and future as a cultural form.