Experimental physiology was exploited as a metaphor and a model for the work of authors and critics. The final two chapters advance the book’s trajectory which takes in increasingly diverse literary forms and traces how vivisection became loosened from its ethical and political contexts. Chapter 7 studies how Émile Zola and August Strindberg drew up principles of naturalism by fashioning themselves as literary vivisectors and presenting the stage and the novel as sites of experimentation. They did so by interrogating the connection between observation and intervention and by cultivating an attitude of objective absence imported from experimental physiology. By reframing their works within the context of the vivisection debates (to which naturalism was deeply indebted), the chapter offers a reconsideration of how these writers sought to uncover physiological and psychological laws that would make literature entirely scientific.

This chapter identifies and analyses some of the major trends of the millennial novel in French from the huge and diverse corpus on offer: ‘reality, not realism’, ‘history, but for the present’, ‘fantasy and the ludic’, ‘language, but not for language’s sake’. The titles signal how these millennial versions of trends recognisable from past centuries have taken on nuances that clearly distinguish them from their predecessors. The millennial ‘realist’ novel stages authentic, non-fictional voices within a fictional frame, using the fictional as a means of investigation into reality; the millennial historical novel takes a présentiste (Hartog) approach to history, often using the present tense to bring even the distant past into the realm of the present. The millennial version of the fantastical and ludic novel benefits from the readers’ greater awareness of the novel as a created object, an awareness which is also exploited by writers of more popular literature. So too do the novelists who experiment with language, producing works that depend on the reader’s acceptance of it as belonging to a fictional universe. The chapter concludes that a readership trained in the art of novel-reading is vital to the success of all of these trends.