nouveau roman, le [noo‐voh roh‐mahⁿ], the French term (‘new novel’) applied since the mid‐1950s to experimental novels by a group of French writers who rejected many of the traditional elements of novel‐writing, such as the sequential plot and the analysis of characters' motives. The leading light of this group was Alain Robbe‐Grillet, whose essays on the novel in Pour un nouveau roman (1963) argue for a neutral registering of sensations and things rather than an interpretation of events or a study of characters: these principles were put into practice most famously in his anti‐novel La Jalousie (1957). Other notable nouveaux romans include Nathalie Sarraute's Le Planétarium (1959) and Michel Butor's La Modification (1957); Sarraute's Tropismes (1938) is often cited as the first nouveau roman.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Copyright © Chris Baldick 2001, 2004. All rights reserved.