We derive many literary terms from the French equivalent - it's just to add a large degree of snootiness to book-speak - but, unfortunately, these terms also provide an excellent shorthand to convey somewhat complicated ideas, dammit ! Here are a few for your delectation, minus their diacritical marks:
Roman a Clef - a work of fiction in which real people are portrayed by using fictional names. This avoids libel suits, and is known in German as a Schlussel-roman. A good example is Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point.
Roman a deux sous - what we call a dime novel, and the Brits call a penny dreadful.
Roman a tiroirs - a novel consisting of a series of episodes which have no obvious connection among them. In English, literally a novel with drawers.
Roman Fleuve - a continuous series of novels which delineates the life of a single character, or group of characters. We refer to these as series.
Roman Policiers - a detective story.
Roman Noir - originally referring to the English Gothic novel - Frankenstein is as noir as it gets; more recently simply as "noir" to describe film and literature most of which isn't. True noir lacks romance and resembles Kafka more than Chandler, Hammett, et al. Martin Goldsmith's Detour and Edgar Ullmer's filming of the novel are genuine, where crime is a destiny and not a glorious profession and the police are marginal figures a lot less scary than that cloud you are under.
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