Question: how to explain the genre of a book

title: Novel
text: The 20th century novels deals with a wide range of subject matter . Erich Maria Remarque 's All Quiet on the Western Front ( 1928 ) focusses on young German 's experiences of World War I . The Jazz Age is explored by American F. Scott Fitzgerald , and the Great Depression by fellow American John Steinbeck . The rise of totalitarian states is the subject of British writer George Orwell . France 's existentialism is the subject of French writers Jean - Paul Sartre 's Nausea ( 1938 ) and Albert Camus ' The Stranger ( 1942 ) . The counterculture of the 1960s led to revived interest in Hermann Hesse 's Steppenwolf ( 1927 ) , and produced such iconic works of its own like Ken Kesey 's One Flew Over the Cuckoo 's Nest and Thomas Pynchon 's Gravity 's Rainbow . Novelist have also been interested in the subject of racial and gender identity in recent decades . Jesse Kavadlo of Maryville University of St. Louis has described Chuck Palahniuk 's Fight Club ( 1996 ) as `` a closeted feminist critique '' . Virginia Woolf , Simone de Beauvoir , Doris Lessing , Elfriede Jelinek were feminist voices during this period .