This is the first book to examine places and spaces in French war fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries as literary isotopias or fictional «worlds». Four isotopic modes are established: possession, dispossession or loss, alienation, and repossession. The spaces considered include territorial demands, gains, losses, national spaces and mental spaces.

Autorentext

Peter D. Tame was Reader in French Studies at Queen s University Belfast from 1999 to 2013. He specialises in the literary representation of ideology and politics in French fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His recent publications include an annotated and fully edited translation of Robert Brasillach s memoirs, entitled Before the War (2003), André Chamson 1900 1983: A Critical Biography (2006), and two co-edited volumes on war and memory, Mnemosyne and Mars: Artistic and Cultural Representations of Twentieth-Century Europe at War (2012) and The Long Aftermath: Historical and Cultural Legacies of Europe s Wars 1936 1945 (2014). He has been awarded the Prix Robert Brasillach (1980) and the Académie Française s Prix Hervé Deluen (2007).

Inhalt

Contents: Roland Dorgelès, Les Croix de bois (1919): Memotopia of martyrdom - Raymond Radiguet, Le Diable au corps (1923): Egotopia and erotopia - André Chamson, Roux le bandit (1925): Rurotopia and sacrotopia in the Cévennes - Jules Romains, Prélude à Verdun (1937) and Verdun (1938): Les Hommes de bonne volonté (1932-1947) - Jean Giraudoux, Siegfried et le Limousin (1922): Amnesotopia - The effect of war on individual memory in peacetime - André Chamson, L'Année des vaincus (1934): A Franco-German utopia/dystopia? - André Malraux, L'Espoir (1937): The Spanish Civil War, as a preliminary to the Second World War - Robert Brasillach, Les Sept Couleurs (1939): A rainbow too far - European Fascism and a divided France - On the margins: Julien Gracq, Un Balcon en forêt (1958) - Oneirotopia in conflict and wartime - France violated: Irène Némirovsky, Suite française ([1941/1942] 2004) - The labyrinth of defeat: Claude Simon, La Route des Flandres (1960) - The rape of eastern Europe: Jonathan Littell, Les Bienveillantes (2006) - the Nazi occupation in Soviet Russia, France, Hungary, Poland - Sweet Occupation? Suite française Part II «Dolce» - Irène Némirovsky's novel on the German occupation of France - East and West: Political isotopias in André Malraux's Les Noyers de l'Altenburg (1943) - The dark, dystopian night-time of the soul: André Chamson's Le Puits des miracles (1945) - The conquest of a contested colonial space revisited: Robert Brasillach's La Conquérante (1943) - Jean Dutourd, Au bon beurre (1952): A 'cornutopia' - Profiteering in Occupied France - France 1945: A space under reconstruction in Marcel Aymé's Uranus (1948) - Ecotopia in Romain Gary's Les Racines du ciel (1956) - Isotopias in invented autobiography: Four novels on the Occupation by Patrick Modiano.