“A novel sequence is a set or series of novels which share common themes, characters, or settings, but where each novel has its own title and free-standing storyline, and can thus be read independently or out of sequence. A novel sequence contains story arcs or themes that cross over several books, rather than simply sharing one or more characters.”
Examples
- Cooper, Leatherstocking Tales (1821-41)
- Balzac, The Human Comedy (1829-48)
- Trollope, Chronicles of Barsetshire (1855-67)
- Zola, The Rougon-Macquarts (1871-1893)
“A roman-fleuve (French, literally ‘river-novel’) is an extended sequence of novels of which the whole acts as a commentary for a society or an epoch, and which continually deals with a central character, community or a saga within a family. The river metaphor implies a steady, broad dynamic lending itself to a perspective. Each volume makes up a complete novel by itself, but the entire cycle exhibits unifying characteristics. The 19th-century predecessors may be distinguished as being rather ‘family sagas,’ as their stories are from the perspective of a single family, rather than society as a whole.”
Examples
- Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1908-22)
- Roger Martin du Gard, The Thibaults (1922–40)
“Literary naturalism emphasizes observation and the scientific method in the fictional portrayal of reality. Naturalism includes detachment, in which the author maintains an impersonal tone and disinterested point of view; determinism, which is defined as the opposite of free will, in which a character’s fate has been decided, even predetermined, by impersonal forces of nature beyond human control; and a sense that the universe itself is indifferent to human life.” (Wikipedia)
“Literary Naturalism traces back most directly to Émile Zola’s “The Experimental Novel” (1880), which details Zola’s concept of a naturalistic novel, which traces philosophically to Auguste Comte’s positivism, but also to physiologist Claude Bernard and historian Hippolyte Taine. Comte had proposed a scientific method that ‘went beyond empiricism, beyond the passive and detached observation of phenomena.’ The application of this method ‘called for a scientist to conduct controlled experiments that would either prove or disprove hypotheses regarding those phenomena.’ Zola took this scientific method and argued that naturalism in literature should be like controlled experiments in which the characters function as the phenomena.” (Wikipedia)