The TORCH Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse network is hosting a talk with Professor Ann Jefferson (French, University of Oxford) on ‘A Genre in Crisis: The Novel in 1940s France’.

The French novel has twice been deemed to be in crisis over the course of the 20th century, first from the 1890s to the 1920s and then during the 1940s. In this talk I shall be exploring what factors were at stake in this extreme-sounding diagnosis of a literary genre.