Fiona McIntosh-Varjabédian is professor of comparative literature at the University of Lille. She has worked on the writing of history and of the historical novel. She works currently on the representation of randomness and determinism in 19th-century literature.Alison Boulanger is maître de conferences in comparative literature at the University of Lille. Her main field of research is the way in which twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels grapple with history, shaping and questioning its representations.