The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction

This book, first published in 1984, is based on readings of the novels of three major representative practitioners of the nouveau roman. Since its beginnings in the 1950s the nouveau roman has posed a major challenge to the theory of the novel because its practitioners claimed to have jettisoned the mainstays of nineteenth-century fiction: plot, character and the representation of reality. Consequently the nouveau roman has tended to generate radical or even subversive theories of the novel which have little to contribute to our understanding of the main stream of the genre. In this study, Ann Jefferson reassesses the theoretical implications of the nouveau roman and the terms in which fiction is generally defined, in order to demonstrate that the nouveau roman, far from being anti-fiction, is both profoundly novelistic and extremely instructive about the nature of fiction in general.