Julian Barnes from the Margins

Vanessa Guignery is Professor of Contemporary English and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. Her previous publications include The Fiction of Julian Barnes (2006).

Vanessa Guignery brings to this work her own unparalleled knowledge of Julian Barnes's work, her years of study in the archives, her keen critical ability to extract meaning from that study, her access to the author's own thoughts about his working practices, and a fluent, lucid and compelling prose style to produce a brilliant and essential book.

• Introduction Chapter One. Metroland: everything that got away 1. Faltering starts 2. ‘Petty Gripes’ and ‘Oua, oua, oua’ 3. The Death Chapter 4. Return to Metroland Chapter Two. The case for / The case against 1. Reviewing and being reviewed 2. The case of Before She Met Me a. Julian Barnes’s reButs to Hermione Lee’s Buts b. Finding the right title Chapter Three. A chronology (of sorts) Chapter Four. Flaubert’s Parrot from ignition to composition 1. Flaubert Stories 2. The fictional narrator Chapter Five. The Barnes apocrypha 1. A Literary Guide to Oxford: the itinerary of a book that was never published 2. The unwritten books which tantalize Chapter Six. Staring at the Sun: a novel of forking roots and paths 1. Multiple roots and titles 2. Early starts Chapter Seven. Fragments of stories: A History of the World in 10½ Chapters 1. Planning, naming and arranging chapters 2. Not so simple stories 3. ‘Parenthesis’ 4. With a little help from my friends Chapter Eight. The Porcupine in the making: writer and translator 1. An outsider’s view 2. Is and is not 3. The ending of the novel 4. The libel risks Chapter Nine. A dictionary of Julian Barnes Chapter Ten. Arthur & George: beginnings and endings 1. First and final steps 2. The blind spots of research 3. The art of beginning 4. Finding a JB title 5. Working out tenses Chapter Eleven. Nothing to Be Frightened Of as an echo chamber 1. The obsession with death: from the early notebooks to Nothing to Be Frightened Of 2. This is not an autobiography 3. Fictionalising memory in The Only Story Chapter Twelve. The Sense of an Ending: time in reverse 1. Prequels in real life 2. A sequel to Metroland? 3. Getting started: the title and the incipit 4. A denser text Conclusion Works Cited Index