psychological novel

American  

noun

1. a novel that focuses on the complex mental and emotional lives of its characters and explores the various levels of mental activity.

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Etymology

Origin of psychological novel

First recorded in 1850–55

Example Sentences

The psychological novel gained prominence as the 19th-century world became mapped and colonized, the mind offering a new realm for discovery.

From The Wall Street Journal • Oct. 8, 2025

In a sense, she’s a person who always has a psychological novel going on inside her head, and where would the psychological novel be without Dostoyevsky?

From The New Yorker • Jan. 16, 2017

In a way The Voyeur is a savage but pointless reaction against the psychological novel.

From Time Magazine Archive

Another depressing, well-written psychological novel by a morbid author of the introspective school.

From Time Magazine Archive

It contains incidents which recall the licence tolerated in Fielding; but the coarseness, like that of Fielding, is always on the surface, and devoid of the ulterior suggestiveness of the modern psychological novel.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" by Various