"A preference for things Gallic": Julian Barnes and the French Connection.

This chapter explores Julian Barnes's relationship with French culture and literature in his fiction and non-fiction, and seeks to delineate the contours of the traditions within which he situates himself and explore the ways in which he revisits and assesses the French legacy from a British viewpoint. Although frequently labelled 'postmodernist', Julian Barnes is nevertheless often drawn back to the literature of the nineteenth century and to French masters of realism and modernism. His admiration for the French literary canon leads him to engage a fertile exchange with the past while at the same time creating his own original voice