A01=Rachel Bowlby
Author_Rachel Bowlby
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9780198874126
- Weight: 348g
- Dimensions: 145 x 224mm
- Publication Date: 10 Apr 2025
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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).
