The New Novel

The term New Novel (nouveau roman) became associated with a group of French writers in the 1950s, most notably Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, Marguerite Duras, Michel Butor, and Robbe-Grillet, who rejected literary traditions of plot, action, narrative, and characterization, and created a new novelistic form that presented an objective record of events. Robbe-Grillet coined the term New Novel in his published essays on the nature and future of the novel, later collected in his Pour un nouveau roman in 1963.

Originally this group of writers was referred to as romanciers du regard, "novelists of the glance." Jeanine Plottel, in her article on Robbe-Grillet for European Writers, explains, "When the accuracy of this term came to be questioned and the diversity of these writers became more and more obvious, their novels more and more puzzling," the term nouveau was adopted.

Initially the French literary world...