Cambridge University Press have recently added another title to their Cambridge Companions to Literature series in the form of The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel from 1800 to the Present, which is edited by Professor Timothy Unwin. The work is a collection of essays by 14 of the world’s leading experts on the French novel. Indeed, the majority of contributors are university professors and all hold posts in leading British, Irish, Australian or North American university French departments.
The Companion to the French Novel is not intended as a comprehensive manual to the novel in the period but rather as a broad overview of the key features for students and the general reader. It will, however, also present experts with some interesting points for reflection. The book aims to provide the reader with a challenging yet user‐friendly insight to the key authors, works, developments, forms and history of the French novel, reassessing and testing established views. The book will certainly require intellectual effort for “The reader is invited not to receive ready made knowledge but rather to participate in its construction”.
A total of 15 concise chapters focus on key aspects which include the invention of the modern French novel, popular fiction, gender and sexual identity, postmodern fiction, the influence of war and the holocaust and the francophone novel. There are two intriguing essays on the latter, one on the French‐Canadian novel and the other on the colonial and postcolonial novel. Essays discuss influential works and authors, demonstrating how they relate to other novels and writers, and to other forms, ideas and the literary background of the time. For example, in his chapter, “Existentialism, engagement, ideology”, Steven Ungar uses Sartre’s La Nausée, Malraux’s La Condition Humaine and Nizan’s Antoine Bloye as representative works to consider the main developments in this phase of the novel.
It is very evident that care has been taken to ensure that the chapters flow together, interlocking to develop an overall picture of the genre through the two centuries, rather than the work simply offering a collection of loosely connected essays. Contributors frequently refer to what their colleagues have stated in previous chapters; for example, in the chapter “Gender and sexual identity in the modern French novel” Jane Winston refers back to ideas expressed previously by Margaret Cohen in her section on “Women and fiction in the nineteenth century”. The contributors are to be congratulated for this, and particularly the editor Timothy Unwin for succeeding in co‐ordinating the efforts of 14 experts spread across the globe and gelling their contributions into a cohesive whole. All in all the result is a fascinating and refreshing coverage of the French novel over the course of the last two centuries.
A list of suggestions for further reading is provided for each chapter along with a separate general bibliography of reference works at the end of the book, an index and a chronology. Priced at £13.95 for the softback and £37.50 for the hardback, one of the formats should be a priority for purchase for relevant libraries. Given the success of this volume one can only hope that Cambridge University Press will ask some if not all of the contributors to produce further works in the series on a selection of the authors discussed in this tome to complement the Cambridge companions to Brecht, Hemingway, Chaucer and Wilde.
