«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.

Autorentext

David Gascoigne is Honorary Senior Lecturer in French at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His publications have largely focused on French narrative of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including books on Michel Tournier, and on Georges Perec and ludic fiction. After excursions into Oulipian paratext, Dadaist poetry and the writings of Pascal Bruckner, he has more recently been preoccupied with the writing of Marie Nimier: his contribution here is the fifth article he has published on her work.

Ana Maria Sousa Aguiar de Medeiros is Director of the Modern Language Centre at King's College London. She has published a number of volumes focusing on the writing of Francophone authors including Assia Djebar, Marie Nimier, Amélie Nothomb and Marguerite Yourcenar. Since 2016, she has been a co-investigator working with Language Acts and Worldmaking and a consultant for Memoirs, a Horizon 2020-funded project.