Émile Zola: Writing Modern Life (My Reading)

Émile Zola: Writing Modern Life (My Reading)

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. "An engrossing and exhilarating journey into the great Zola's world of sex, shopping, and work in late nineteenth-century France." -- Lisa Appignanesi, Author of Everyday Madness , Freud's Women , and more. "Illuminating...fascinating...[Bowlby] reveal[s] him to have been a fundamentally dynamic novelist-evolving in step with the tempo of the times, continually thinking and rethinking the past, the present, even the future. ...superb." -- Alexander Lee, The Critic "A wonderful read, and Bowlby's love of Zola's work really comes through. Her insights into his life and work are perceptive, and she really does shine a light on the pleasures to be gained by reading Zola." -- Karen Langley, Shiny New Books "Bowlby has reinstated Zola as a fascinatingly complex personality whose "modern life" has a resonance today." -- Suzi Feay, The Idler "As eloquent and as thought-provoking an introduction to Zola as you could possibly wish for." -- David Trotter, Author of Literature in the First Media Age Rachel Bowlby is Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at University College London. She is the author, most recently, of Back to the Shops:The High Street in History and the Future (2022) and Unexpected Items: Shopping, Parenthood, Changing Feminist Stories (2024).