David Gascoigne – författare

«The collection of well-written essays offers creative and compelling readings of Nimier’s work that can serve to introduce readers to the author’s contributions to the field of autofiction, gender, and memory, to name only a few themes, or prompt new areas of inquiry for established researchers of her work. What is more, the inclusion of creative works not only allows readers to discover Nimier’s newest texts, but also reflects the creative energies of an author whose writing project includes song, theatre, and dance.» (Lisa Connell, H-France Review 22.41, March 2022)«This volume constitutes a landmark in the study of one of France’s foremost contemporary writers. The diversity and originality of its critical approaches and the scholarship and creativity in evidence on every page make it essential reading for anybody interested in Marie Nimier, or in 'self and subject' in contemporary writing.» (Professor Shirley Jordan, Newcastle University)«This diverse collection casts much-needed light on Marie Nimier’s corpus and does full justice to the complexity and richness of Nimier’s writing. It excavates with skill and sensitivity the multiple palimpsestic layers of the narrative self – whether historical, familial, sensorial or linguistic – and illuminates the relational resonances Nimier’s texts provoke, both readerly and literary.» (Professor Siobhán McIlvanney, King’s College London)In the postwar literary culture of France, under the influence of Structuralism and its aftermath, deference to «the text in itself» meant that literary studies eschewed discussing narrators or characters as subjects and deriving social or political commentary from specific texts. In reaction to this trend, which also influenced the writing of novels, a new generation of authors have sought instead to focus on developing innovative ways of conceptualizing subjecthood, identity and agency. Marie Nimier’s writing abundantly exemplifies this «return of the subject» in the rich diversity of the fifteen novels she has published since Sirène in 1985, blending fiction and life-writing. Her narrators/protagonists typically strive to achieve forms of agency which are made possible, yet also threatened, by the ostensible «givens»: heritage, memory, gender, relationships, desire, social environment and, not least, language itself. This volume explores central aspects of self and subject in her oeuvre to date and includes two short stories which Nimier formally publishes here for the first time, one with an English translation.

This intriguing book provides a up-to-date introduction to the works of Michel Tournier, arguably the most internationally influential French novelist of the last 25 years. His novels have been widely translated and have often provoked controversy and incurred charges of perversion. This study examines the nature of the attack which Tournier mounts on many of the norms and assumptions of Western culture and his often startling reinterpretation of the mythologies which have nourished and sustained it. His critical review of contemporary culture places him in a radical tradition of French writers and aligns him with contemporaries such as Barthes, Foucault and some aspects of post-modernist thinking. This is the first study to provide a full picture of Tournier not just as a novelist but also as a prophet and dissenter who brings creative disruption to bear on what he views as deeply rooted repressive structures of thinking and feeling.

This intriguing book provides a up-to-date introduction to the works of Michel Tournier, arguably the most internationally influential French novelist of the last 25 years. His novels have been widely translated and have often provoked controversy and incurred charges of perversion. This study examines the nature of the attack which Tournier mounts on many of the norms and assumptions of Western culture and his often startling reinterpretation of the mythologies which have nourished and sustained it. His critical review of contemporary culture places him in a radical tradition of French writers and aligns him with contemporaries such as Barthes, Foucault and some aspects of post-modernist thinking. This is the first study to provide a full picture of Tournier not just as a novelist but also as a prophet and dissenter who brings creative disruption to bear on what he views as deeply rooted repressive structures of thinking and feeling.

This volume presents selected papers from the conference ‘Violence, Culture and Identity’ held at St Andrews University in 2003. It seeks to explore the ways in which French writing since 1920 has registered and reflected on the violent national traumas of the World Wars, the Occupation and decolonisation. The essays consider how these crises have led French writers to a critical, often painful reassessment of national, cultural and individual identity. Contributors trace the different challenges offered to any comfortable consensual notions of Frenchness, and to the structures of authority which invest in such a consensus. A recurrent preoccupation is the problematic issue of ‘memory culture’, especially of how a post-conflict generation copes with an avowed or concealed inheritance of violence and guilt. The thematics, ethics, rhetoric and imagery of violence are charted through debates around surrealism and in writings by major figures, such as Malraux, Sartre, Camus, Genet and Modiano, while a final group of essays looks closely at how a new wave within the popular roman noir genre (the ‘néo-polar’) engages emphatically and controversially with these issues and their political implications.