Antinovel

antinovel or new novel: see French literature; Robbe-Grillet, Alain.

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antinovel

Type of avant-garde novel that departs from traditional novelistic conventions by ignoring such elements as plot, dialogue, and human interest. Seeking to overcome readers' habits and challenge their expectations, antinovelists deliberately avoid any intrusion of authorial personality, preferences, or values. Though the term was coined by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1948, the approach is at least as old as the works of the 18th-century writer Laurence Sterne. Writers of such works include Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Uwe Johnson, and Rayner Heppenstall.

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antinovel

a type of prose fiction in which conventional or traditional novelistic elements are rejected

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Antinovel 

an accepted concept used along with the term “new novel” to characterize certain genres in the prose of modernism. The “antinovel” is to be found primarily among French writers of the late 1940’s and 1950’s—for example, S. Beckett, A. Robbe-Grillet, N. Sar-raute, and M. Butor. Having declared a break with the realistic novel in its classical forms (hence the term “anti-novel”), the representatives of the “new novel” also rejected the developed plot, the hero with an integral inner world and character, and the portrayal of any coherent picture of social struggle.

G. K. KOSIKOV