Émile Zola: Writing Modern Life

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 mo...