Mourning as both an affective state and a temporal process, characterises the harrowing experience of loss as much as it problematises the prospect of a recovery. While in literature, the representations of grief and painful reminiscence usually take a poetic or an autobiographical form, fiction, and the novel in particular, seems to stand at the crossroads between the poetic elegy and the grief memoir. In order to identify the specificity of fictional writing and its generic influences, this thesis purports to examine the language of grief in the contemporary novel, defining it as a poetics of intimate emotion. This potential redefinition of elegiac lyricism is thus related to the conceptualization of mourning as a movement. The analysis of the metaphorical wound of loss, which both marks a rupture and is a sign of relationality, is grounded in the theoretical fields of vulnerability and trauma. In order to explore the fictional representations of mourning, this work focuses on four British novels and two Irish novels, which were published between 1987 and 2012: Keywords: mourning, grief, intimate, novel, elegy, tomb, Ian McEwan, Penelope Lively, John Banville, Anne Enright, Graham Swift, Ali Smith The Child in Time (Ian McEwan, 1987), The Photograph (Penelope Lively, 2003), The Sea (John Banville, 2005), The Gathering (Anne Enright, 2007), Wish You Were Here (Graham Swift, 2011), et Artful (Ali Smith, 2012). The study of those contemporary narratives of mourning is articulated around the metaphor of the open tomb (in French, “tombeau ouvert”), thus linking the figures of poetic or musical composition (the artistic subgenre of the “tombeau”) and the funereal monument, in order to analyse the grieving process, but also the memorialization of the dead. Between the consolatory horizon of the traditional elegy and the melancholy of its modern counterpart, the anti-elegy, the open tomb carves an intermediate path, which questions the possibility, the ethical scope and the temporality of the mourner’s recovery