By crossing literary and historical approaches, this monograph releases a European corpus which reveals the role of fiction for the formation of nations, but also the imprints that political interpretations leave on literary works.

The ubiquity of fictional narrators in fictional narratives has been a fundamental assumption that distinguishes narratology from previous narrative theories. Ever since the first formulations of this assumption, however, voices have come forward to denounce oversimplifications and dangerous confusions of issues.

After the Second World War, the Eastern bloc did not forget Zola, the author of Germinal, the committed intellectual; he was seen as a great "defender of truthˮ, and this despite the reticence of major Marxist figures, from Engels to Lukács.

The French contemporary narrative reveals a disturbing fascination for the irrational. Rather deserting the too bright shores of reason, it summons magical and often anachronistic figures (spectres, shamans, witches) to probe the meanders of a collective psyche whose fears and phantasms resist the paths of rationalism.

This volume questions the role of figures in thought, since the middle of the 20th century. It focuses on voice in written language, through the work of writers and philosophers.