Zola and the Craft of Fiction

This is a full-length study of Zola's practice as a novelist. Although Zola's literary achievement has been revalued in the last 25 years, critical attention has been concentrated on the contrast between his work's realistic dimension and its poetic power. Now the balance is redressed by this study of Zola as a craftsman. Most of the ten specially commissioned chapters in this book are concerned with its great saga of "Les Rougon-Macquart". In each, Zola's techniques are related to problems on genre and representation and several relate his techniques to those used in contemporary melodrama, journalism and impressionist painting. One chapter is a deep, computer-assisted study of the ways in which Zola's novels are organized, and the study of conscious organization, both of the novel-cycle and individual texts, is the major theme of the entire book.