As a result of French colonization, Haiti is a nation-state with a predominantly French-speaking written tradition. However, there is also a smaller body of Haitian texts written in Creole, dating back to the eighteenth century. Based on their linguistic and aesthetic characteristics, we can divide the corpus of Haitian Creole letters into two main chronological stages: the great period of emergence that stretches from colonial times to the middle of the twentieth century, and the period of emulation. The first period was dominated by texts of a mainly religious, administrative, and political nature. Written for the most part by high-ranking white settlers, these texts, using the local language, were intended for Creole-speaking slaves with a poor command of French. The second period, that of the autonomy of Creole letters or the beginnings of an authentic Creole literary tradition, began in the mid-twentieth century, in parallel with linguistic work to standardize the written code of the national language. This advance in the standardization of Creole led to a significant development of the language’s written code, particularly in the field of literature.

The present volume provides a wide-ranging history of the novel in French from the fourteenth century to the present, illuminating and offering readers routes through a varied landscape while comparison and connection making between writers, works and historical periods. It does so via accessible accounts of how novelists writing in French have responded to the diverse economic, socio-political, cultural-artistic and environmental factors that shaped the world in which they found themselves. The editor’s introduction outlines the existing scholarship and provides a summary account of the structuring and approach taken in the volume (a history of the novel in French, rather than of the French novel). It then gives an overview of the five sections into which the volume is divided: ‘Beginnings’; ‘The Eighteenth Century: Learning, Letters, Libertinage’; ‘After the Revolution: the novel in the long nineteenth century’; ‘From Naturalism to the nouveau roman’; and ‘Fictions of the Fifth Republic: from de Gaulle to the Internet Age’. Echoes, imbrications and cross-references across and between these sections serve as reminders of the artificiality of the cut-and-dried, linear periodizing approach of much literary history.