Nouveau Roman

The Nouveau Roman, or New Novel, was a French literary movement of the 1950s and 1960s that rejected the conventions of traditional narrative fiction, including linear plot, psychologically coherent characters, and an authoritative narrating voice, in favor of fragmented, often disorienting prose that foregrounds the material texture of objects, perception and the act of narration itself. Its central figures included Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose novels and critical essays, collected as For a New Novel, provided the movement's clearest theoretical statement, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, published together largely through the Paris publisher Editions de Minuit. Influenced by a broader mid-century skepticism toward realist convention, the Nouveau Roman's radical formal experiments proved highly influential on later experimental fiction internationally even as the movement's own readership remained relatively small, and Claude Simon's 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature is often cited as the movement's most significant international recognition.