French Fiction Revisited     by Leon S. Roudiez Published by Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: April 1, 1991 Format: Paperback, 350 pages ISBN: 0916583732 List Price: $14.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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The most interesting French ficti on since World War II is also the most revolutionary, exploring new narrative techniques and incorporating challenging new ideas in aesthetics, politics, psychoanalysis, gender, linguistics, and philosophy. This fiction looks strange and forbidding to Ame r ican readers, however, which makes Roudiez's overview of postwar French fiction a welcome guide. In a revised and updated version of his French Fiction Today (Rutgers, 1972), Roudiez includes chapters on an important precursor—Raymond Roussel—and on thi r teen of the most significant innovators in French fiction. A concluding chapter discusses younger writers (like Muriel Cerf and Patrick Grainville) who are carrying on this revolutionary activity, and an extensive bibliography includes all English transla tions of their work. As the Virginia Quarterly Review said of the first edition, "This is a masterful analysis . . . which should serve handily as a thoroughly reliable guide and reference tool for many years to come."

Contents:

Raymond Roussel

Nathalie Sarraute

Maurice Blanchot

Marguerite Duras

Claude Simon

Robert Pinget

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Claude Ollier

Michel Butor

Jean Pierre Faye

Philippe Sollers

Maurice Roche

Jean Ricardou

Georges Perec

The Next Generation

"[Roudiez writes with] a note of urgency and a sense of passionate commitment to the subject treated which is not often met with in the writings of academic critics. . . . Professor Roudiez has written one of the most intelligent, humane, and accessible guides to the subject, a book that truly enriches one's appreciation and understanding even of writers whose work one thought one knew well."—Modern Language Review

"[No previous study has] succeeded so well as the present in bridging the gap between the specialist and the general reader, in dem onstrating what appears to be the most significant aspect of the new 'revolutionary' writing inspired by what generally is termed 'Structuralism.' . . . This is an important book."—Choice

"It is good to see a critical work like this which can convince the reader that not only was French fiction important twenty years ago, but that this fiction is still a center of intellectual interest we should not ignore."— World Literature Today