French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years

In the 1980s and 1990s French fiction has rediscovered its mission to entertain and tell stories, as well as to negotiate a path through traumatic experiences such as the legacy of France's colonial and wartime past, the Holocaust, the spectre of Aids, the labyrinths of desire and personal identity. Colin Davis and Elizabeth Fallaize examine some of the most popular and some of the most challenging of texts which emerged during Franois Mitterrand's presidency of France (1981-1995) and relate them to the dominant literary and cultural trends of the period.