Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Zola Before the Rougon-Macquart

Zola Before the Rougon-Macquart

Lapp, John

Paperback

Series: Heritage

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1487576897
ISBN13: 9781487576899
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: Dec 15 1964
Pages: 186
Weight: 0.59
Height: 0.39 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
Zola has begun to receive the serious critical study he deserves, but which, chiefly for religious and political resons, has until recent years been denied. Professor Lapp now makes an important contribution to this recent work on Zola. It is his belief that a study of the early works of all great writers is indispensable to an understanding of their main work (in this case Rougon-Macquart). In making his examination Professor Lapp has been interested in determining whether certain patters of plot, character, situation, and image which occur constantly throughout the Rougon-Macquart were present also in the works prior to 1870. His study shows that they were, and it places Zola in the novelistic tradition stretching from the eighteenth century to the present. It also demonstrates that Zola's chief problem, like Balzac's and Flaubert's, was to reconcile the romantic and the realistic world views. This clash of opposites becomes more evident when the earlier works are studied: in his first novel, La Confession de Claude, which like others of his early works has strong elements of autobiography in it, Zola exclaims concerning the ugly prostitute whom he makes his heroine, and whom Claude loves: I am the dream, she is the reality. Evidently part of Zola's development involves the struggle for objectivity which he never fully obtains, since Claude-Zola appears in almost all of his novels.

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