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In answer to the numerous attacks on pastiche and simulation which are supposed to restrict contemporary fiction to a logic of repetition and to an imprisonment in the past, with James Miranda Barry Patricia Duncker presents a novel where the writing principles and the thematic concerns, the novelistic codes and the diegetic motifs are combined around the precise notion of simulation. Of a sexual nature for the protagonist and of a stylistic nature for the author, simulation becomes creative insofar as it is inscribed in a double-coded frame where the language of fiction is hybrid and where the imitative approach is revisited with a critical and self-reflexive irony. Showing that text and gender can be fabricated, imitated, counterfeited, Duncker sets out to exploit the concept of performativity in order to raise it to the level of an aesthetic principle. Through its lengthy intertextual references, its recurrent metatextual commentaries and its sophisticated hypertextual devices, James Miranda Barry harmonizes all its textual practices to place the hegemony of performative logic at the center of its novelistic apparatus. Be it textual or sexual, it is indeed performativity which creates the aesthetic unity of this novel of ideological and ontological challenges.