Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois, André, Malraux, the early Jean-Paul Sartre--these were writers torn between politics and the pleasures of the text, maturing in the 1930s and 1940s in a world that would have no place for literature. And yet it was the work of these writers that shaped French literature--influencing Derrida, Foucault, de Man, Deleuze, and Ricoeur--and so profoundly affected literary enterprise in the English-speaking world since 1968. This literary history, the prehistory of postmodernism, is what Hollier recovers in his interlocking studies of the main figures of French literary life before the age of anxiety gave way to the era of existentialist commitment.