Presentation of this volume, dedicated to Jean-Pierre Richard. The considerable importance of this vast and deeply perceptive body of criticism – whose scope reaches from the 19th and 20th centuries to contemporary novelists – which has given back to the reading of works, as the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty would say, the « flesh of the world », their foundations in the senses, from whence emerge any will to be, any desire to discover and construct oneself through writing – is reminded. The contemporary novelists he had first read have been asked to bear witness, for a mirror portrait of their reader.