Zola, The Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of RepresentationEmile Zola's reputation as a landmark European novelist is undisputed. His monumental achievement, the novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire sociale et naturelle d'une famille sous le Second Empire (1871-1893), fixed his status as a major writer in the naturalist tradition. Is there any more to be said? Susan Harrow answers boldly in the affirmative, challenging the commonplace view that Zola's writing is predictable, prolix and transparent (what Barthes called 'readerly', for which read 'tedious'). Harrow exposes the modernist and postmodernist strategies which surface in the Rougon-Macquart novels, and reveals Zola's innovatory representation of the body captured here at work, at war, at play, at rest, and in arresting abstraction. Informed by critical thought from Barthes and Deleuze to Michel de Certeau and Anthony Giddens, Zola, the Body Modern offers a model for how we can revitalize our understanding of the canonical nineteenth-century European novel, and learn to travel more flexibly between parameters of century, style and aesthetics. |
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Contents
1 | |
Unfolding Modernity | 23 |
The Embodiment of Style | 71 |
The Social Body | 145 |
Summations and Speculations | 207 |
217 | |
223 | |
Other editions - View all
Zola, the Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation Susan Harrow No preview available - 2010 |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic anticipates articulates avait Barthes Bête humaine Bonheur des Dames c’est C’était Cabuche Certeau chapter characters Claude Clorinde Clotilde corporeal critical critique cultural Curée d’amour d’une Débâcle Deleuze Denise desire deux diegesis discourse Docteur Pascal Edouard Manet embodied Emile Zola erotic Excellence Eugène Rougon explore Flaubert Florent Fortune des Rougon fracture Germinal Gervaise human individual instances L’Assommoir L’Œuvre La Bête humaine La Curée La Débâcle language Lantier Le Docteur Pascal Les Rougon-Macquart literary Macquart Mallarmé Manet material modernity metafictional metaphor metonymic mise en abyme Mitterand modernist Mouret Nana narrator Naturalist Plassans plot political Pot-Bouille qu’il reader readerly reading Renée repetition representation resistance Rêve rhetorical Roland Barthes Rougon-Macquart series Saccard sense sexual Silvère social body sous space style stylistic synecdoche Terre textual thematic Thérèse Raquin tout transformation tropes Ventre de Paris vision visual writerly Zola Zola’s narrative Zola’s novels Zola’s writing Zolian