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roman à clef

 
Dictionary: ro·man à clef   (rō-mäN' ä klā') pronunciation

n., pl., ro·mans à clef (rōmäN' zä klā').
A novel in which actual persons, places, or events are depicted in fictional guise.

[French : roman, novel + à, with + clef, key.]


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Wordsmith Words: roman a clef
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(ro-mahn ah KLAY)

noun, plural romans a clef
A novel that depicts (usually famous) real people and events under the guise of fiction.

Etymology
From French roman à clef, literally, a novel with a key

All fiction has a grain of truth, but a roman a clef has it by the bushel. Roman a clef dates back to seventeenth century France. In the beginning, a roman a clef really did have a key that was published separately. In these times, you can simply go on the Internet and search using Google. An example of roman a clef is Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.
These days the term can apply to any work of fiction, for example, a movie, not just a novel. A blend term "faction" has also been used, after "fact" presented as "fiction".

Usage
"[Geraldine] Brooks has borrowed details not just from Little Women but from the story of Alcott's own extraordinary father, Bronson Alcott, a man whose freethinking, utopian views were all downplayed in his daughter's roman a clef." — Michelle Griffin; March; Sydney Morning Herald (Australia); Apr 2, 2005.



Novel that has the extraliterary interest of portraying identifiable people more or less thinly disguised as fictional characters. The tradition dates to 17th-century France, when members of aristocratic literary coteries included in their historical romances representations of well-known figures in the court of Louis XIV. A more recent example is W. Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale (1930), widely held to portray Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole. A more common type of roman à clef is one in which the disguised characters are easily recognized only by a few insiders, as in Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins (1954).

For more information on roman à clef, visit Britannica.com.

Literary Dictionary: roman à clef
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roman à clef [roh‐mahn a klay], the French term (‘novel with a key’) for a kind of novel in which the well‐informed reader will recognize identifiable persons from real life thinly disguised as fictional characters. A significant English example is Thomas Love Peacock's satirical novel Nightmare Abbey (1818), in which ‘Mr Flosky’ is clearly the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Mr Cypress’ is Lord Byron, and ‘Scythrop’ is Percy Bysshe Shelley. Very many novels based upon their authors' own lives are to some degree romans à clef.

Grammar Dictionary: roman à clef
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(roh-mahn ah klay)

A novel in which actual people and places are disguised as fictional characters. Roman à clef is French for “novel with a key.”

 
 
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Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wordsmith Words. © 2009 Wordsmith.org. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Literary Dictionary. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Copyright © Chris Baldick 2001, 2004. All rights reserved.  Read more
Grammar Dictionary. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.  Read more