A new strain of realism has emerged in France. The novels that embody it represent diverse fears—immigration and demographic change, radical Islam, feminism, new technologies, globalization, American capitalism, and the European Union—but these books, often best-sellers, share crucial affinities. In their dystopian visions, the collapse of France, Europe, and Western civilization is portrayed as all but certain and the literary mode of realism begins to break down. Above all, they depict a degenerative force whose effects on the nation and on reality itself can be felt.

Examining key novels by Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Aurélien Bellanger, Yann Moix, and other French writers, Christy Wampole identifies and critiques this emergent tendency toward “degenerative realism.” She considers the ways these writers draw on social science, the New Journalism of the 1960s, political pamphlets, reportage, and social media to construct an atmosphere of disintegration and decline. Wampole maps how degenerative realist novels explore a world contaminated by conspiracy theories, mysticism, and misinformation, responding to the internet age’s confusion between fact and fiction with a lament for the loss of the real and an unrelenting emphasis on the role of the media in crafting reality. In a time of widespread populist anxieties over the perceived decline of the French nation, this book diagnoses the literary symptoms of today’s reactionary revival.

"Degenerative Realism is a thought-provoking and valuable piece of work." - The French Review

"[This book] marks a decisive, important theorization of a crucial–and deeply troubling–turn in contemporary French realism . . . Wampole’s study will doubtless provide the benchmark for further developments in the studies of the works and trends discussed under the auspices of ‘Degenerative Realism.'" - French Forum

"[A] brilliant study . . . Wampole’s knowledge of the theory and context of declinist thought in France is second to none, and her readings in this vein are compelling." - French Studies

"Wampole’s readings are bold and creative, her prose lively and readable, her insights consistently profound and acute." - H-France

"Wampole’s Degenerative Realism uncomfortably but salutarily draws our attention to the underbelly of the literature of progress that scholars of French studies prefer to read. In carefully teasing out the relations and resonances between our contemporary political landscape and what is transpiring on the literary landscape, Wampole shows how it is degenerative realism, with its dark, mostly unsavory texts, that is best positioned to force us out of our own illusions into examining the fictions that we pass off as realities in our lives. Becoming attuned to degenerative realism cannot help but change the way we read everything else, and in this regard, Wampole has produced a work that is deeply generative." - Novel: A Forum on Fiction