roman-fleuve

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

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

The show is framed as a documentary in the style of Michael Apted’s “Up” film series, which began in 1964 as an exposé of the British class system but ended up as a real-life roman-fleuve — the 14 children in the film grew up and led lives far richer and less predictable than their social status would suggest.

From New York Times

One of the pleasures of any roman-fleuve lies in keeping track of the pasts and permutations of vast numbers of characters.

From Time Magazine Archive