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Anthropology and Novel - About the Divorced FathersIn this article, the authors consider contemporary American novel [Russell Banks, Affliction, 1989, Richard Ford, Independence Day, 1990] as an ethnological “field”, giving meaning to the experience of fatherhood after divorce. They analyze two stories of divorced fathers in these novels, using in parallel North American and French sociological and anthropological studies. Within very different social contexts, they investigate the complex relations between paternity and conjugality, and attempt to describe how relations between fathers and children change after divorce. The new context of fatherhood, often reduced to a right of access or a visitation agreement, leads to a lonely and intermittent parental relation, which transforms and weakens paternity.