roman à clef
/rəʊˌmɑn.əˈkleɪ/
roman à clef noun: a piece of fiction, especially a novel, describing real-life people or events.
Noun
roman à clef (plural romans à clef)
- A piece of fiction, especially a novel, describing real-life people or events.
- I want to emphasize that in this respect my account of romance differs substantially from both Annabel Patterson's argument that the primary purpose of roman à clef in early modern England was to avoid censorship and Michael McKeon's […]2007, A. Zurcher, Seventeenth-Century English Romance: Allegory, Ethics, and Politics, Springer, →ISBN, page 9
- In the end, the fragmentary nature of the text and Dora's abrupt decision to terminate her treatment indicate that as a narrative technology, the roman à clef fails. This owes less to the particulars of the individual case, however, than to Freud's […]2009, Sean Latham, The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 57
Forms of roman à clef
| plural | romans à clef |
|---|
Origin of roman à clef
Borrowed from French roman à clef (literally “novel with a key”).
Questions about roman à clef
- What does roman à clef mean?
- Roman à clef means a piece of fiction, especially a novel, describing real-life people or events.
- What part of speech is roman à clef?
- Roman à clef is a noun.
- How do you pronounce roman à clef?
- Roman à clef is pronounced /rəʊˌmɑn.əˈkleɪ/.
- What is the plural of roman à clef?
- The plural of roman à clef is romans à clef.
Words near roman à clef in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: roman à clef (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “roman à clef.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/roman_%C3%A0_clef. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.