roman-fleuve

[ raw-mahn-flœv ]

noun

, French.

, plural ro·mans-fleuves [r, aw-mah, n, -, flœv].

1. saga ( def 3 ).

roman-fleuve

/ rɔmɑ̃flœv /

noun

1. a novel or series of novels dealing with a family or other group over several generations

Word History and Origins

Origin of roman-fleuve¹

literally: stream novel

Example Sentences

Still, given the intricate recursions among the books he published in his lifetime — his love of mirrors and fractals and labyrinths, his gestures toward some Borgesian roman-fleuve — the bootleg feel of more recent editions has started to pose an aesthetic problem.

From New York Times

I’ve a sneaking suspicion that Lee Child’s Reacher novels, with their affectless prose and numbed heroics, may end up being understood as a great, experimental roman-fleuve of our time.

From New York Times

I look upon the items in each issue of the Robesonian as a few more paragraphs or pages or even chapters in a novel that I have been reading for a long time now and that I expect to keep on reading as long as I live, a sort of never-ending to-be-continued serial about the ups and downs of a group of interrelated rural and small-town families in the South, a sort of ever-flowing roman-fleuve.

From The New Yorker

Kynaston's acclaimed multi-volume history of Britain since 1945, with its overarching title "Tales of a New Jerusalem", resembles a roman-fleuve: a sequence of novels, each one complete in itself, depicting successive phases of national life, or successive generations of a family, of the sort that Balzac, Zola and Proust produced.

From The Guardian

By the time of the Larkin biography, Motion had left Hull, been editor of Poetry Review magazine and editorial director of Chatto, had published an influential anthology of contemporary British poetry, written the first two parts of a proposed – and then abandoned – roman-fleuve novel cycle, as well as continuing to teach and serve as an arts committee stalwart.

From The Guardian