New novel

The new novel , generally named New Novel, is a literary movement of the years 1950-1970, gathering some writers belonging mainly to the Éditions of Midnight. The term was created, with a negative direction, by the critic Emile Henriot in an article of the newspaper Le Monde of May 22nd, 1957, to criticize the novel '' the Jealousy '', of Alain Robbe-Grillet. The term will be exploited at the same time by literary reviews eager to create topicality as by Alain Robbe-Grillet which wished to promote the authors that it joined together around him at Minuit, where it was to advise leading.

Authors in rupture

In spite of their name, the “new novelists” did not form a literary avant-garde. But with the difference of novelists who had found their style, like Louis-Ferdinand Céline, they partly reinvented theirs with each novel. Each book wanted to be completely new, and became the place of a new experimentation on the writing. Very diverse styles and projects, with the pretext which they called in question the traditional bases of the novel, thus accepted the label new novel, causing important debates of the “new criticism” against traditional criticism in the literary newspapers and reviews.

Pushing back conventions of the traditional novel, such as it had been essential since the 18th century and opened out with authors like Balzac or Zola, the new novel wanted to be an art conscious of itself. The position of the narrator was in particular questioned there: which is it its place in the intrigue, why tells or writes it? The intrigue and the character, which were seen before as the base of any fiction, became problematic or grew blurred, with different orientations for each author, even for each book. The play, or “ventures it writing” (Ricardou), consisted in making burst the codes, in particular by being essential justified constraints (and not free).

Some “new novelists”

The “new novel” having taken end in the years 1970, the authors of the 21e century cannot form part of it.

See too

Internal bonds

External bond

  • a literary movement, the New Novel
  • New novel: bibliography
  • Thesis of Pierre Verdrager on the reception by the press of one of the principal authors of the new novel: Nathalie Sarraute
  • '' Such as it is and New Novel '', re-examined '' Public Sens ''

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