Roman-fleuve

A roman-fleuve, French for river-novel, is an extended sequence of novels that together serve as a commentary on a society or an era, built around one central character, community or family saga across the whole sequence, with each individual novel complete in itself yet also readable as part of the larger cycle. The practice of tracing a family or an era through a linked sequence of novels derives from Balzac and Zola and reached its culmination between 1900 and 1940 in the work of Romain Rolland, Roger Martin du Gard, Georges Duhamel and Jules Romains; Rolland coined the river metaphor to describe his own ten-volume cycle Jean-Christophe. Other examples include Marcel Proust's seven-part In Search of Lost Time and Jules Romains' twenty-seven-volume Men of Good Will.