Since the late 1970s prose fiction in France has continued to flourish, not so much in the guise of a dominant genre – the Novel – concerned with its intrinsic scope and methods, but as an instrument for investigating a wide range of experiences. Whereas Roland Barthes, in the heyday of structuralist ‘textuality’, the nouveau roman and Tel Quel, had declared that writing was ‘an intransitive verb’, fictional writing now becomes transitive again, but not via a return to traditional forms. While popular or ‘middlebrow’ writing continues to use staple conventions, honed since the mid-nineteenth century, the writers who make a lasting impact in this period (including Modiano, Ernaux, Michon, Djebar, Echenoz, NDiaye, and Quignard) innovate formally by combining narrative fiction with such non-fiction modes as autobiography, biography, testimony, the essay, reportage, and historical or sociological enquiry whilst engaging with different forms of reality – historical, global, social, or personal. The period that saw the rise of autobiography (a key moment being the publication of radically innovative autobiographical texts by Barthes and Georges Perec in 1975), then autobiography's mutation into multiple channels of life-writing with, concurrently, the return of a preoccupation with history (Perec referred to ‘l'Histoire avec sa grande hache’), has sometimes been characterised as a period of ‘returns’. But if it is legitimate to talk of a ‘return’ to the human subject, extra-textual reference, and lived experience, the ‘real’ that comes back is not the same as before but a reality located at another point of the spiral, as Barthes put it, a point where autobiography and history, for example, or fiction and testimony, merge rather than diverging.