In Negotiating the New in the French Novel, Teresa Bridgeman applies insights from pragmatic theory to the French novel in order to examine its discursive conventions. Focusing on texts by some of the greatest and most innovative French novelists, Diderot, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Celine, Sarraute, Perec, Bridgeman analyzes how authors have established their own conventions, challenged reader expectations and drew conventions from other literary and non-literary forms. Of particular interest is the positioning of author, narrator, implied reader and reader through language and paralinguistic strategies.

Rather than offer a history of the novel, Bridgeman concentrates on the interactive relationship between created, fictional worlds and their various contexts. Combining close readings of individual texts with theoretical frameworks drawn from various models of language-use, this study is an essential contribution to the study of French writing and literature in general.