Zola, The Body Modern
Pressures and Prospects of Representation
Susan Harrow
Legenda 11 February 2010 • 240pp ISBN: 978-1-906540-76-0 (hardback) • RRP £80, $110, €95 Emile Zola's reputation as a landmark European novelist is undisputed. His monumental achievement, the novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire (1871–1893), fixed his status as a major writer in the naturalist tradition. Is there any more to be said? Susan Harrow answers boldly in the affirmative, challenging the commonplace view that Zola's writing is predictable, prolix and transparent (what Barthes called ‘readerly’, for which read ‘tedious’). Harrow exposes the modernist and postmodernist strategies which surface in the Rougon-Macquart novels, and reveals Zola's innovatory representation of the body captured here at work, at war, at play, at rest, and in arresting abstraction. Informed by critical thought from Barthes and Deleuze to Michel de Certeau and Anthony Giddens, Zola, the Body Modern offers a model for how we can revitalize our understanding of the canonical nineteenth-century European novel, and learn to travel more flexibly between parameters of century, style and aesthetics. Susan Harrow is Professor of French at the University of Bristol. Reviews:
Bibliography entry: Harrow, Susan, Zola, The Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation (Legenda, 2010) First footnote reference: 35 Susan Harrow, Zola, The Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation (Legenda, 2010), p. 21. Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Harrow, p. 47. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.) Bibliography entry: Harrow, Susan. 2010. Zola, The Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation (Legenda) Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Harrow 2010: 21). Example footnote reference: 35 Harrow 2010: 21. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)
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