This study focuses on the return of the narrative as applied by literary historians. Through the 1980s, criticism on the hermetic nature of many postmodern texts grew louder and louder: novelists expressed the wish to restore the bonds between the reader and the texts as well as between the texts and the extra-literary reality. Many fiction writers have grown tired of formalism and restore the conventions of realism, though not using them in a passive manner. Literary historians dealing with the post-postmodern or late postmodern European novel agree that conventional techniques are...