nouveau roman

Experimental literary form produced in the 1950s by French novelists including Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. In various ways, these writers seek to eliminate character, plot, and authorial subjectivity in order to present the world as a pure, solid ‘thing in itself’.

Robbe-Grillet's Le Voyeur 1955 and Sarraute's Le Planetarium 1959 are critically successful examples. Michel Butor, Claude Ollier, and Marguerite Duras also contributed to this form, which is sometimes labelled the ‘anti-novel’ because of its subversion of traditional methods.