From its outset, this book set itself a critical agenda that deflected attention away from the reflexive and metafictional aspects of the selected texts in favour of a reading that would highlight their thematic range and density and provide some measure of the complexity of their engagement with the ‘real’ and with the social, religious and cultural structures by which man tries to make sense of reality. Foremost on this agenda and central to the inquiry conducted in the intervening pages have been the following priorities: the provision of a selective survey of late twentieth-and early twenty-first century fiction and autofiction highlighting the thematic, as opposed to purely formal, continuity linking contemporary French narrative with its ancestors of the 1960s and 1970s; the demonstration of the recurrence across the corpus of a thematic pattern relating to ritual, passage and liminality; the exploration of this pattern through a series of close readings which, while drawing upon ritual theory for their broad framework, would be responsive to the inflections and nuances of each text; and, finally, the identification of some of the thematic preoccupations and formal features that appear to give the constantly growing body of each writer's œuvre its distinctive authorial stamp.

The core chapters of the study have each focused on a particular moment of passage, a particular set of ritual practices or, in the case of chapter four, an item – the photograph – that has figured at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first-century secular ritual activities and that has played a hugely important role in the reinforcement of kinship and community bonds. In each case, however, the comparative analysis of a single motif or set of motifs across several narratives has permitted the isolation of telling thematic intersections and divergences and has offered firm interpretative purchase upon the internal dynamics of the selected texts. Repeatedly in the course of the book we have observed not only the pivotal importance of the themes of passage and liminality across these writers’ work, but also the frequency and the attentiveness of their engagement with a remarkably wide range of liminal experiences and ritual or quasi-ritual activities.