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This monograph is the first book to examine places and spaces in French war fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These places and spaces are presented as literary isotopias, or fictional "worlds," and analysed in a selective corpus of thirty-three novelists and forty-two examples of war fiction. The book identifies and classifies the various types of isotopia that appear in fiction in the form of scenes, images or literary microcosms. The author establishes four isotopic modes--possession, dispossession or loss, alienation, and repossession--by which means the isotopias are expressed. The spaces considered include territorial demands, gains, possessions, losses and national spaces, as well as internal mental spaces. The corpus of novels selected for this project covers a wide variety of examples of fictional worlds: the spiritual, the marginal, the regional, the ideological, the psychological, the erotic, the ecological and the political. The methods of analysis identify these worlds, demonstrate both how they function in relation to the characters in the novels and how they affect the reader, and provide further illumination on the intentions, achievements and ideologies of the characters and of the novelists concerned. One of the findings of the study is that the greater the stress of war and conflict the more authors and characters tend to seek refuge in their imaginary (isotopic) worlds. -- From publisher's website Pt. 1 The Great War -- ch. 1 Roland Dorgeles, Les Croix de bois (1919): Memotopia of martyrdom -- ch. 2 Raymond Radiguet, Le Diable au corps (1923): Egotopia and erotopia -- ch. 3 Andre Chamson, Roux le bandit (1925): Rurotopia and sacrotopia in the Cevennes -- ch. 4 Jules Romains, Prelude a Verdun (1937) and Verdun (1938): Les Hommes de bonne volonte (1932 -- 1947) -- Conclusion to Part 1 -- pt. 2 The War between the Wars -- ch. 1 Jean Giraudoux, Siegfried et le Limousin (1922): Amnesotopia -- The effect of war on individual memory in peacetime -- ch. 2 Andre Chamson, L'Annee des vaincus (1934): A Franco-German utopia/dystopia? -- ch. 3 Andre Malraux, L'Espoir (1937): The Spanish Civil War, as a preliminary to the Second World War -- ch. 4 Robert Brasillach, Les Sept Couleurs (1939): A rainbow too far -- European Fascism and a divided France -- Conclusion to Part 2 -- pt. 3 Invasion -- ch. 1 On the margins: Julien Gracq, Un Balcon en foret (1958) -- Oneirotopia in conflict and wartime -- ch. 2 France violated: Irene Nemirovsky, Suite francaise ([1941/1942] 2004) -- ch. 3 The labyrinth of defeat: Claude Simon, La Route des Flandres (1960) -- ch. 4 The rape of eastern Europe: Jonathan Littell, Les Bienveillantes (2006) -- the Nazi occupation in Soviet Russia, France, Hungary, Poland -- Conclusion to Part 3 -- pt. 4 Occupation -- ch. 1 Sweet Occupation? Suite francaise Part II, ̀Dolce' -- Irene Nemirovsky's novel on the German occupation of France -- ch. 2 East and West: Political isotopias in Andre Malraux's Les Noyers de l'Altenburg (1943) -- ch. 3 The dark, dystopian night-time of the soul: Andre Chamson's Le Puits des miracles (1945) -- ch. 4 The conquest of a contested colonial space revisited: Robert Brasillach's La Conquerante (1943) -- Conclusion to Part 4 -- pt. 5 Liberated spaces after 1945 and beyond -- ch. 1 Jean Dutourd, Au bon beurre (1952): A ̀cornutopia' -- Profiteering in Occupied France -- ch. 2 France 1945: A space under reconstruction in Marcel Ayme's Uranus (1948) -- ch. 3 Ecotopia in Romain Gary's Les Racines du del (1956) -- ch. 4 Isotopias in invented autobiography: Four novels on the Occupation by Patrick Modiano -- Conclusion to Part 5
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