Description

What does it mean to write with "unblushing candour"?

In Zola: A Life In Naturalism, H.H. Soltan offers the readers a chance to redefine the life of one of the boldest novelists in history. Emile Zola was not only a storyteller but also a social reformer who felt that literature could be used to heal the social ills of the 19th century by determining biological and environmental factors that lead to human behaviour.

This book follows the life of Zola from a provincial intellectual in southern France to a metropolitan powerhouse in Paris. It shatters the philosophical foundations of his work, such as his embrace of the scientific method and his response to the romantic literature of his forebears. Soltan offers an easy but strict introduction to the Rougon-Macquart cycle, the way Zola traced the fate of statesmen and prostitutes in twenty novels that were interlaced.

Key chapters dive into:

Theory of Naturalism: The way Zola used the physiology of Claude Bernard in fiction. The Masterpieces: Close-ups on the coal-mining battles of Germinal, the city squalor of L'Assommoir, and the sexual politics of Nana. The Activist: An exciting retelling of the Dreyfus Affair and how Zola developed a new template of the writer-as-activist. The Legacy: The influence of Zola on the film and visual narration and on contemporary literature in the world.

Full of historical background and literary commentary, this book is a must-have for anyone seeking to know the shift from Realism to Modernism. It is an Essay about artistic aspiration, political valour, and the indefatigable search after the truth, at any rate.