Nouveau roman

Ivor Griffiths, Poet, Novelist & Short Story Writer

:: Poet Home :: Poetry :: Short Stories :: Contact ::
Portal:French literature
French literature
Portal
French literature
By category
French literary history

Medieval
16th century - 17th century
18th century -19th century
20th century - Contemporary

French Writers

Chronological list
Writers by category
Novelists - Playwrights
Poets - Essayists
Short story writers

France Portal
Literature Portal
This box: view  talk  edit

The nouveau roman (French: "new novel") is a type of 1950s French novel that diverged from classical literary genres. Émile Henriot coined the title in an article in the popular French newspaper Le Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe certain writers who experimented with style in each novel, creating an essentially new style each time.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, an influential theorist as well as writer of the nouveau roman, published a series of essays on the nature and future of the novel which were later collected in Pour un nouveau roman. Rejecting many of the established features of the novel to date, Robbe-Grillet regarded many earlier novelists as old-fashioned in their focus on plot, action, narrative, ideas, and character. Instead, he put forward a cool party of the novel as focused on objects: the ideal nouveau roman would be an individual version and vision of things, subordinating plot and character to the details of the world rather than enlisting the world in their service.

Despite the assertions of nouveauté, this vision of the novel can be construed as developing from earlier writers' suggestions and practice. Joris-Karl Huysmans, ninety years before, had suggested how the novel might be depersonalised; more recently, Franz Kafka had shown that conventional methods of depicting character were not essential; James Joyce had done the same for plot; and absurdist writers had engaged with some of the themes which preoccupied writers of the nouveau roman.

Authors in the style of the nouveau roman

  • Maurice Blanchot
  • Michel Butor
  • Marguerite Duras
  • Claude Ollier
  • Robert Pinget
  • Jean Ricardou
  • Alain Robbe-Grillet
  • Nathalie Sarraute
  • Claude Simon

See also

  • French literature
  • Francophone literature
  • List of French language authors
  • Antinovel
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from a Wikipedia article. To access the original click here.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU
Free Documentation License".