This magisterial biography of the strangely private and unknown man is also a superb history of social and literary France in the late 19th century and of the political and intellectual world through which Zola travelled.

Controversy surrounded Zola during his life-time, and controversy has followed him ever since. No other French writer was so violently attacked by contemporaries, none had a more devoted following. This high priest of Naturalism scandalized France by the frankness of his treatment of the seamier side of human nature and electrified the whole of Europe and America by his denunciation of the military establishment of his country over the Dreyfus case. His reputation has remained in dispute ever since his mysterious death in 1902, some critics arguing his work's consistently high and original literary quality, others its undue reliance on cheap sensationalism. This biography, which at was the first in English for twenty-five years when it was first published in 1966, draws on significant material to present a full and rounded account of a life that progressed from abject poverty to powerful influence and relative affluence, an account that considerably modifies our ideas about a writer who was always a public figure but at the same time a defensively shy and secretive man. F.W.J. Hemmings delineates the social facts that lay behind Zola's great panoramic cycle of novels Les Rougon-Macquart, with its theme of corruption spreading through all levels of French society from the festering economic degradation at the bottom of the social scale. Consideration of the real-life settings of such novels as The Drunkard, Nana, Germinal and Earth gives us enhanced appreciation of the compelling power of these works.

It is the evening of 18 July 1898 and the world-renowned novelist Émile Zola is on the run. His crime? Taking on the highest powers in the land with his open letter 'J'accuse' and losing. Forced to leave Paris, with nothing but the clothes he is standing in and a nightshirt wrapped in newspaper, Zola flees to England with no idea when he will return.This is the little-known story of his time in exile. Rosen has traced Zola's footsteps from the Gare du Nord to London, examining the significance of this year. The Disappearance of Zola offers an intriguing insight into the mind, the loves, the politics and the work of the great writer.

Of his contemporaries in painting, experimental psychology, and criticism. The author also analyzes three paintings from the impressionist period in detail and relates them to the handling of thematic content, viewpoint, and description in Zola's novels. William Berg traces the impact of vision in many of the major areas of novelistic endeavor: Zola's theories stress the key role of vision in the the experimental method. Optical instruments and effects, underscoring.

Contains English translations of sixteen short fiction stories by nineteenth-century French author Emile Zola.