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Since Romanticism, literature has embraced the myriad forms of powerlessness inherent in the complexity of the modern world. This book examines the reasons and methods that have transformed powerlessness into a literary object, from Balzac to Huysmans, from Proust to Queneau, from Malraux to Michaux, via Tinan, Amiel and Beckett to Chaillou, Senges, and the writers of post-mémoire and extrême contemporain. In particular, it shows how French literature from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century has been built on the enunciation of its own limits and those of man in the face of reality and history. It constitutes an invitation to reconsider contemporary discourses on the decline of the literary and to rethink the fictionalisation of powerlessness in terms of revival.