The Presses Universitaires de France and Fremeaux & Associes offer tutorials on the history of French literature, narrated, explained and analyzed by Alain Viala, Professor Emeritus at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, with excerpts read by Daniel Mesguich, comedian, director, and writer. At the end of the First World War, everything had to be rebuilt. Collective trauma is exorcised in literature by a frenetic renewal, an intensity of creation, and a desire for revolution. Everywhere, political and militant engagement is expressed, both in substance and in form, and shapes the vital need to create a whole generation. This course opens the doors to the understanding of a literature given in context and reveals the delicate mechanisms invented to conquer spaces unknown in the unconscious, in thought, or in beauty.