Psychological novel

A novel that gives sustained attention to characters’ thoughts, motives, and emotional lives, often making inner experience central to its plot and form.

Stream of consciousness: A literary technique that represents the shifting flow of a character’s thoughts and perceptions. It gives direct narrative form to the inner life central to this kind of novel.
Madame Bovary: Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel about Emma Bovary, whose romantic aspirations collide with provincial life. Its close attention to Emma’s fantasies and disappointments makes inner life drive the story.
Samuel Richardson: An English novelist whose epistolary fiction helped establish sustained attention to characters’ feelings and moral choices. His letter-based narratives made private emotion a major source of plot.
Picaresque novel: A prose-fiction form following a resourceful low-born protagonist through episodic adventures. Its sequence of outward exploits contrasts with sustained attention to inner life.
Free indirect discourse: A narrative mode that blends third-person narration with a character’s idiom, judgments, and perceptions. It lets narration move between an external voice and a character’s consciousness.
Crime and Punishment: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel about Rodion Raskolnikov, a former student who commits murder and faces its aftermath. Raskolnikov’s shifting justifications and guilt make the crime a study of consciousness.
Sentimental novel: An eighteenth-century prose-fiction tradition that emphasizes emotion, sympathy, and moral feeling. It helped prepare fiction to treat emotional experience as worthy of extended narrative attention.
Adventure novel: A novel organized chiefly around hazardous journeys, physical action, or extraordinary events. Its emphasis on external action differs from a plot centered on motives and feeling.
Interior monologue: A literary presentation of a character’s unspoken thoughts as if spoken internally. It makes private reasoning and feeling available without dialogue.
The Portrait of a Lady: Henry James’s novel about Isabel Archer, an American woman whose choices expose her ideals and vulnerabilities. James makes Isabel’s interpretation of people and possibilities central to the narrative.

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