New Novel, French nouveau roman, also called (more broadly) antinovel, avant-garde novel of the

mid-20th century that marked a radical departure from the conventions of the traditional novel in that it
ignores such elements as plot, dialogue, linear narrative, and human interest. Starting from the premise
that the potential of the traditional novel had been exhausted, the writers of New Novels sought new
avenues of fictional exploration. In their efforts to overcome literary habits and to challenge the
expectations of their readers, they deliberately frustrated conventional literary expectations, avoiding
any expression of the author’s personality, preferences, or values. They rejected the elements of
entertainment, dramatic progress, and dialogue that serve to delineate character or develop plot.

The term antinovel (or, more precisely, anti-roman) was first used by Jean-Paul Sartre in an introduction
to Nathalie Sarraute’s Portrait d’un inconnu (1948; Portrait of a Man Unknown). This term has often
been applied to the fiction of such writers as Sarraute, Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite
Duras, and Michel Butor and is therefore usually associated with the French nouveau roman of the
1950s and ’60s. In place of reassuring conventions, these French authors offered the reader more
demanding fiction, presenting compressed, repetitive, or only partially explained events whose meaning
is rarely clear or definitive. In Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie (1957; Jealousy), for example, the narrator’s
suspicions of his wife’s infidelity are never confirmed or denied. The story is not laid out chronologically,
but rather the reader is subject to the narrator’s obsessive review of observed details and events.

Though the word antinovel is of relatively recent coinage, the nonlinear approach to novel writing is at
least as old as the works of Laurence Sterne. Works contemporary with the nouveau roman but written
in other languages—such as the German novelist Uwe Johnson’s Mutmassungen über
Jakob (1959;Speculations About Jakob) and the British author Rayner Heppenstall’s Connecting
Door (1962)—share many of the characteristics of the New Novel, such as vaguely identified characters,
casual arrangement of events, and ambiguity of meaning.
he term ("anti-roman" in French) was brought into modern literary discourse by the French philosopher
and critic Jean-Paul Sartre in his introduction to Nathalie Sarraute's 1948 work Portrait d’un
inconnu (Portrait of a Man Unknown).[1] However the term "anti-roman" (anti-novel) had been used
by Charles Sorel in 1633 to describe the parodic nature of his prose fiction Le Berger extravagant.

The antinovel usually fragments and distorts the experience of its characters, presenting events outside
of chronological order and attempting to disrupt the idea of characters with unified and stable
personalities.

Although the term is most commonly applied to the French nouveau roman of the 1940s, 1950s and
1960s, similar traits can be found much further back in literary history. One example is Laurence
Sterne's Tristram Shandy, a seemingly autobiographical novel that barely makes it as far as the title
character's birth thanks to numerous digressions and a rejection of linear chronology.[1]
Aron Kibédi Varga has suggested that the novel in fact began as an anti-novel, since the first novels such
as Don Quixote subverted their form even as they were constructing the form of the novel.
Realism and Naturalism

In Music and Art

As intellectual and artistic movements 19th-Century Realism and Naturalism are both responses to
Romanticism but are not really comparable to it in scope or influence.

For one thing, "realism" is not a term strictly applicable to music. There are verismo (realistic) operas like
Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chénier created in the last decade of the 19th century in Italy, but it is their
plots rather than their music which can be said to participate in the movement toward realism. Since
"pure" untexted music is not usually representational (with the controversial exception of "program"
music), it cannot be said to be more or less realistic.

In contrast, art may be said to have had many realistic aspects before this time. The still lifes and
domestic art of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin1 (1699-1779) anticipate many of the concerns of the 19th-
Century Realists, and he in turn owes a debt to the Netherland school of still-life painting of the century
before him, and one can find similar detailed renderings of everyday objects even on the walls of 1st-
century Pompeii. Realism is a recurrent theme in art which becomes a coherent movement only after
1850; and even then it struggles against the overwhelming popularity of Romanticism.

In mid-19th century France, Gustave Courbet2 set forth a program of realistic painting as a self-conscious
alternative to the dominant Romantic style, building on earlier work by the painters of the Barbizon
School (of which the most famous member was Jean-François Millet), which had attempted to
reproduce landscapes and village life as directly and accurately as possible. Impressionism can be seen
as a development which grew out of Realism, but in its turn still had to battle the more popular
Romanticism. Realism has never entirely displaced the popular taste for Romantic art, as any number of
hotel-room paintings, paperback book covers and calendars testify. It became just one more style
among others.

In Fiction

Realism's most important influences have been on fiction and the theater. It is perhaps unsurprising that
its origins can be traced to France, where the dominant official neoclassicism had put up a long struggle
against Romanticism. Since the 18th century the French have traditionally viewed themselves as
rationalists, and this prevailing attitude in intellectual circles meant that Romanticism led an uneasy
existence in France even when allied with the major revolutionary movements of 1789 and 1830.

Balzac

Novelist Honoré de Balzac3 is generally hailed as the grandfather of literary Realism in the long series of
novels and stories he titled La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), and which attempted
systematically to render a portrait of all aspects of the France of his time from the lowest thief or
prostitute to the highest aristocrat or political leader. The title of the series was chosen to contrast with
Dante's Divine Comedy, which had portrayed everything except the earthly human realm.

His attention to detail was obsessive, with long passages of description of settings being a characteristic
feature of his work. Today readers resist such descriptive writing, but before films and television were
invented, it had a magical effect on people, causing the world depicted to explode from the page in an
almost tangible fashion. It is important to remember in reading all 19th-century fiction that those
people who had the time and inclination to read novels at all generally had a lot of time to kill, and none
of the cinematic and electronic distractions which have largely replaced recreational reading in our time.
They welcomed lengthy novels (often published serially, over a series of weeks or even months) in the
same way we greet a satisfying television series which becomes a staple of our lives.

Like such a television series, his works also incorporated a device for maintaining his audience: the
continual reappearance of certain characters from one work to the next--now as protagonists, now as
secondary figures. The idea is an old one, going back to classic bodies of work such as the Homeric epics
and the Medieval Arthurian romances; but it had a different effect in Balzac's work: readers could
recognize a slightly altered version of the world they themselves inhabited as they moved from story to
story.

What is not realistic about Balzac's fiction is his plots, filled with sensational conspiracies and crimes and
wildly improbable coincidences. Balzac's works are still essentially Romantic creations with a Realistic
veneer.

Gustave Flaubert

It was Gustave Flaubert who in 1857 produced the seminal work from which later literary Realism was
to flow: Madame Bovary.4 Flaubert had begun his writing career as most young authors in his time did,
as a Romantic, laboring on a tale of Medieval mysticism which was eventually published as La Tentation
de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony). When he read an early draft of this work to some
friends, they urged him to attempt something more down to earth. He chose the story of an adulterous
woman married to an unimaginative country physician unable to respond to--or even comprehend--her
romantic longings. Drawing on the real-life stories of two women--Delphine Delamare and Louise
Pradier--whose experiences he was intimately familiar with, Flaubert labored to turn journalism into art
while avoiding the romantic clichés he associated with his heroine's fevered imagination.

Like Balzac, he engaged in systematic research, modeling the village in his novel on an actual country
town and even drawing a map of it detailed enough to allow scholars to catch him when he has Emma
Bovary turn in the wrong direction on one of her walks. Unlike Balzac, he avoided the sensational sort of
plot lines characteristic of Romantic novels. To modern readers a married woman carrying on two
adulterous affairs and then committing suicide may seem fairly sensational, but it is important to note
that there was a long tradition of tales of female adultery in French literature stretching back as far as
the Middle Ages. What Flaubert did with the theme was give adultery the shocking impact of the
tabloids by stripping his tale of the high romantic idealism that usually justified adultery; instead he
systematically satirized his heroine's bourgeois taste for exotic art and sensational stories. The novel is
almost an anti-romantic tract.

Despite the fact that it is generally agreed to be one of the most finely crafted works to be created in the
19th century, it would probably never have had the impact it did if Madame Bovary had not also been
the subject of a sensational obscenity trial. So restrained were the standards of polite fiction in mid-
19th-century France that many modern readers go right past the big "sex scenes" which got Flaubert
into trouble without noticing them (hints: look for Rodolphe to smoke while working on his harness just
after making love with Emma for the first time while she experiences the afterglow, and for Emma to
toss torn-up pieces of a note out of her carriage during her lovemaking with Léon). However, they were
enough to outrage the defenders of middle-class morality. The prosecution was particularly indignant
that Emma did not seem to suffer for her sins. Flaubert's clever lawyer successfully argued that her
grotesquely described death made the novel into a moral tale; but the fact is that she dies not because
she is an adultress but because she is a shopaholic.

It is not only the literary style of Madame Bovary that is anti-Romantic, it is its subject as well. The
narrative clearly portrays Emma as deluded for trying to model her life after the Romantic fiction she
loves. The novel is a sort of anti-Romantic manifesto, and its notoriety spread its message far and wide.
It is worth noting, however, that Flaubert returned to Romanticism from time to time in his career, for
instance in Salammbo, a colorful historical novel set in ancient Carthage.

Influence of Realism

Realism had profound effects on fiction from places as far-flung as Russia and the Americas. The novel,
which had been born out of the romance as a more or less fantastic narrative, settled into a realistic
mode which is still dominant today. Aside from genre fiction such as fantasy and horror, we expect the
ordinary novel today to be based in our own world, with recognizably familiar types of characters
endowed with no supernatural powers, doing the sorts of things that ordinary people do every day. It is
easy to forget that this expectation is only a century and a half old, and that the great bulk of the world's
fiction before departed in a wide variety of ways from this standard, which has been applied to film and
television as well. Even comic strips now usually reflect daily life. Repeated revolts against this standard
by various postmodernist and magical realist varieties of fiction have not dislodged the dominance of
realism in fiction.

Naturalism

The emergence of Naturalism does not mark a radical break with Realism, rather the new style is a
logical extension of the old. The term was invented by Émile Zola partly because he was seeking for a
striking platform from which to convince the reading public that it was getting something new and
modern in his fiction. In fact, he inherited a good deal from his predecessors. Like Balzac and Flaubert,
he created detailed settings meticulously researched, but tended to integrate them better into his
narrative, avoiding the long set-piece descriptions so characteristic of earlier fiction. Again, like Balzac,
he created a series of novels with linked characters and settings ("Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire
naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le second Empire"--"The Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social
History of a Family During the Second Empire") which stretched to twenty novels. He tried to create a
portrait of France in the 1880s to parallel the portrait Balzac had made of his own times in the Comédie
humaine. Like Flaubert, he focussed on ordinary people with often debased motives.

He argued that his special contribution to the art of fiction was the application to the creation of
characters and plot of the scientific method. The new "scientific novel" would be created by placing
characters with known inherited characteristics into a carefully defined environment and observing the
resulting behavior. No novelist can actually work like this, of course, since both characters and setting
are created in the distinctly unobjective mind of the writer; but Zola's novels do place special stress on
the importance of heredity and environment in determining character. They are anti-Romantic in their
rejection of the self-defining hero who transcends his background. History shapes his protagonists
rather than being shaped by them. This leads to an overwhelming sense of doom in most of his novels,
culminating in a final catastrophe.
Zola further tends to create his principal characters as representative types rather than striking
individuals. He also places great emphasis on people acting in groups, and is one of the few great writers
of mob scenes. Humanity in the mass is one of his chief subjects, and his individuals are selected to
illustrate aspects of society.

Zola can be said to have created in Germinal the disaster narrative exemplified in the 20th century by
Arthur Hailey's novels (Airport) and movies like The Towering Inferno and Titanic. The formula is a classic
one: assemble a varied group of representative characters together in some institution or space and
subject them to a catastrophe and watch how they individually cope with it.

Zola also took frankness about sexual functions much further than the early Realists had dared; and it is
this, combined with a pervasive pessimism about humanity, which chiefly characterizes the Naturalist
novel.

Unlike Flaubert, Zola was not a meticulous craftsman of beautiful prose. At times it seems as if he is
writing with a meat ax; but he undeniably infused French fiction with a refreshing vigor, giving it a tough,
powerful edge far removed from the vaporings of high romanticism.

If Zola often startled the French with his frankness, he shocked readers in other lands, where his works
were often banned, regarded as little more than pornography (an assessment which is quite unfair, but
unsurprising given the temper of the times).

Zola has had an enormous impact on the American novel. Americans with their preference for action
over thought and for gritty realism were strongly drawn to his style of writing. Early 20th-century writers
like Theodore Dreiser applied his approaches to American themes successfully, and Frank Norris
practically stole large chunks of Zola's novels in some of his own works. The mainstream American novel
is preponderantly naturalistic, and gives rise to another genre which still lives on: the hard-boiled
detective story.

For all these reasons, Zola strikes us as far more "modern" than Balzac, or even Flaubert. It can be
argued that the "default" style of modern narrative is Realist, with the various forms of fantastic
narratives which dominated the writing of earlier ages relegated to the margins; and even fantasy is
often judged as to its plausibility. Without altogether banishing Romanticism, Realism and Naturalism
have had considerable success.