In Negotiating the New in the French Novel Teresa Bridgeman applies insights from pragmatic theory to the French novel in order to examine its discourse conventions. Focussing on texts by some of the greatest and most innovative French novelists - Diderot, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Celine, Sarraute and Perec - Bridgeman analyses how these authors established their own conventions, challenged reader expectations and drew conventions from other literary and non-literary forms. Negotiating the New in the French Novel shows the development of changing perceptions of genre, author and reader. It is not a history of the novel, but concentrates on the interactive relationship between created, fictional worlds and their various contexts; in particular on the positioning of author, narrator, implied reader and reader through language and paralinguistic strategies. Bridgeman combines close readings of individual texts with theoretical frameworks, drawn from narratology and functional, cognitive and pragmatic models of language-use. Negotiating the New in the French Novel will make fascinating reading for students of French literature - particularly of the nineteenth century novel, students of Stylistics and of Narratology.