Authoritarian Fictions

Political ideologies often informed early twentieth-century French novels, creating a hybrid genre that is both "realist" and didactic: the roman thse. In this ground-breaking and critically acclaimed work, Susan Suleiman looks beyond the politics of novels by such authors as Malraux, Mauriac, Sartre, and Aragon, and examines their shared formal and generic features. Although the genre itself is considered antimodern, the critical and interpretive problems it raises are central to...
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Political ideologies often informed early twentieth-century French novels, creating a hybrid genre that is both "realist" and didactic: the roman thse. In this ground-breaking and critically acclaimed work, Susan Suleiman looks beyond the politics of novels by such authors as Malraux, Mauriac, Sartre, and Aragon, and examines their shared formal and generic features. Although the genre itself is considered antimodern, the critical and interpretive problems it raises are central to an understanding of both realist and modernist writing. "The great virtue of [Suleiman's] book is its ability to synthesize a range of theoretical ideas--whether formalist, structuralist or "reader-response' in the service of a clear and compelling critical argument."--Christopher Norris, The London Review of Books "This book is certainly one of the best examples of semiotic theory put to use for interpretation of literature and its relation to culture."--Thas Morgan, Genre