This is the third of three DLB volumes to cover French literature of the 20th century. With a few exceptions, DLB Volume 83 features authors whose careers were established around 1960, or whose major works date from this period. These include the New Novelists, although in some cases their work began to appear well before 1960, because of their departures from the dominant trends of the previous decades and their continued and abundant production after 1960. No longer wedded to the formulas of realism, nor to an earlier aestheticism, these New Novelists denied that the world could be imitated in a book, that it was even knowable, and, at the extreme, they saw in fiction a purely mental and arbitrary creation, self-generating and self-reflexive.
32 entries include: Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, Julien Gracq, Claude Mauriac, Jean Ricardou, Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, Francoise Sagan, Michel Tournier, Vladimir Volkoff.