French Novelists of Today [antikvár]

Preface In 1955, an earlier version of this volume on the French novel of today was published by the Oxford University Press. The substance of the book consisted of the Mary Flexner lectures delivered some years earlier at Bryn Mawr College. The author is grateful to Bryn Mawr College for having permitted the reprinting of several chapters from the original volume, then entitled The Contemporary French Novel, in the present work. Much has happened in French fiction between 1950 and 1967. Our perspective on the great figures of the twentieth century has been altered; Proust, Malraux, Green, Bemanos have grown in stature; others, even Gide and Camus, are now viewed more critically; the existentialist novel is no longer in the forefront; and the 'new novelists' launched in the late nineteen-fifties are challenged by even newer ones while the French public becomes increasingly cool to their over-publicized innovations. The temper of the nation which is mirrored, or distorted, in its fiction is strikingly different from what it was in the post-World War II era, when the French looked up to American fiction and felt deeply disturbed by their efforts to catch up with more stable and more prosperous nations. Such changes, and many others, are reflected in this work, in which new chapters have been added on Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and the 'new novelists.' Bibliographies have been brought up to date. A list of over one hundred novelists, with brief critical appraisals of their achievement, has been appended to the book and should prove useful to readers interested in gaining information and in seeing the author's evaluation of