ABSTRACT

This book is neither a theory nor a history of the French novel. It is, instead, an exploration of the dynamics of the threshold, examining texts where the ‘living contact with the unfinished’ (Bakhtin 1981:7) results in a positioning of both text and readers between conceptual worlds. Although the reading of all texts depends on a play between the old and the new, the works discussed here occupy a particular place in the arena of French culture as exemplary models of the unconventional. If ‘becoming’ is, as Bakhtin suggests (1981:5), a chronic and defining condition of the novel, these texts are case-studies in the acute form of the condition. Yet, in challenging the reading habits of their audiences, they have not written themselves out of French literary history but into the canon.