La Seconde Guerre Mondiale ET Le Roman Français Contemporain

The publication of Les Bienveillantes (2006) by Jonathan Littell reanimated the debate about the question of the literary representation of the Shoah and the complex relationship between fiction and history. Yet despite its media attention, Littell's novel is far from being the only French-language novel since the turn of the twenty-first century to explore the dark years of the Second World War. From an important literary production of more than a hundred recent novels, this study analyzes only three which can be seen as representative of one of the principal tendencies of what has indisputably become a major trend in the French contemporary novel: HHhH (2009) by Laurent Binet, L'Origine de la violence (2009) by Fabrice Humbert, and Un Traître (2008) by Dominique Jamet.