?mile Zola: Writing Modern Life (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780198874126)

Zola made it his aim to write novels exploring the many compartments and classes of modern French life in the later nineteenth century--and he went on to carry it out, with novels that look at the longings and troubles and everyday lives of people in their specific social milieux. Travelling through the varieties of Zola's styles and settings, realistic and comic and tragic and critical, from shopping to mining to the fertility business, this book is a guide to the different pleasures and modes of thinking to be found in reading Zola today.

The last part considers the different kinds of story involved in the final years of Zola's own life. It follows him first to England--to Upper Norwood, in south London, where he was in exile for almost a year in 1898-9, as a result of his intervention in the ongoing Dreyfus affair. Long letters home offer moving insights into Zola's whole way of being, in the intimacy of his daily life and his writing routines, set against the public events of the Dreyfus process that continue to resonate today.

Author: Rachel Bowlby
ISBN-10: 019887412X
ISBN-13: 9780198874126
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Language: English
Published: 07/10/2025
Pages: 176
Format: Hardcover