Emile Zola

The seventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, L'Assommoir (1877) is the story of a woman's struggle for happiness in working-class Paris. At the center of the story stands Gervaise, who starts her own laundry and for a time makes a success of it. But her husband soon squanders her earnings in the Assommoir, a local drinking spot, and gradually the pair sink into poverty and squalor.. L'Assommoir was a contemporary bestseller, outraged conservative critics, and launched a passionate debate about the legitimate scope of modern literature. This new translation captures not only the brutality but the pathos of its characters' lives.

The Masterpiece is the tragic story of Claude Lantier, an ambitious and talented young artist who has come from the provinces to conquer Paris but is conquered instead by the flaws of his own genius. Set in the 1860s and 1870s, it is the most autobiographical of the twenty novels in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. It provides a unique insight into Zola's career as a writer and his relationship with Cezanne, a friend since their schooldays in Aix-en-Provence. It also presents a well-documented account of the turbulent Bohemian world in which the Impressionists came to prominence despite the conservatism of the Academy and the ridicule of the general public.

The penultimate novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, La Debacle (1892) concerns the dramatic events of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1870-71. During Zola's lifetime it was the best-selling of all his novels, praised by contemporaries for its epic sweep as well as its attention to historical detail. The novel seeks to explain why the Second Empire ended in crushing military defeat and revolutionary violence. It focuses on ordinary soldiers, showing their bravery and suffering in the midst of circumstances they cannot control. Often War and Peace, La Debacle skilfully integrates the narrative of events and the fictional lives of characters to provide the finest account of this tragic chapter in French history.

Black Venus is a feminist study of the representations of black women in the literary, cultural, & scientific imagination of nineteenth-century France. Employing psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, & the critical race theory articulated in the works of Frantz Fanon & Toni Morrison, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting argues that black women historically invoked both desire & primal fear in French men. By inspiring repulsion, attraction, & anxiety, they gave rise in the nineteenth-century French male imagination to the primitive narrative of Black Venus. The book opens with an exploration of scientific discourse on black females, using Sarah Bartmann, the so-called Hottentot Venus, & natural scientist Georges Cuvier as points of departure. To further show how the image of a savage was projected onto the bodies of black women, Sharpley-Whiting moves into popular culture with an analysis of an 1814 vaudeville caricature of Bartmann, then shifts onto the terrain of canonical French literature & colonial cinema, exploring the representation of black women by Baudelaire, Balzac, Zola, Maupassant, & Loti. After venturing into twentieth-century film with an analysis of Josephine Baker's popular Princesse Tam Tam, the study concludes with a discussion of how black Francophone women writers & activists countered stereotypical representations of black female bodies during this period. A first-time translation of the vaudeville show The Hottentot Venus, or Hatred of Frenchwomen supplements this critique of the French male gaze of the nineteenth & early twentieth centuries. Both intellectually rigorous & culturally intriguing, this study will appeal to students & scholars in the fields of nineteenth- & twentieth-century French literature, feminist & gender studies, black studies, & cultural studies.

"Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, or outright lunatics," the physician and journalist Max Nordau cautioned in 1893, "they are often writers and artists." Indeed, without writers and artists, medical experts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would not have had much of the material on which they based their theories of sexual perversions. Thus it was that Rene Descartes could be diagnosed as a fetishist, because of his inordinate attraction to cross-eyed women, Gustave Flaubert as a hysteric, because of his hypersensitive imagination, and Emile Zola ("the novelist of the quivering nostrils") as an epileptoid degenerate, olfactory fetishist, and sexual psychopath, because of the suspicious richness of odors emanating from the pages of his books. Drawing upon the writings of literary figures such as Diderot, Rousseau, Zola, Flaubert, and Huysmans, and physicians and psychologists such as Tardieu, Binet, and Charcot, Vernon Rosario argues that the modern idea of the perverse first emerged in late 18th-century France and was shaped largely by the strange confluence of medical writings, patient confessions, and literary narratives. Beginning with the shocking revelations of masturbation and masochism in Rousseau's Confessions, and the widespread public alarm over the "fatal convenience" of the "solitary vice," The Erotic Imagination illuminates precisely how various forms of eroticism came to be classified as perversions. Rosario takes the reader through a dizzying proliferation of "pathologies"--including the bizarre theories which enabled doctors to identify homosexuals, or "inverts," according to bodily stigmata, to the "uterine fury" of nymphomania, to an astonishing range of hysterias, fetishes, and erotomanias until finally only marital, reproductive sex survived as normal. Such "perversification" of sexual desire attempted to close off and regulate those erotic expressions seen as threatening to the social order, national population, military power, and the supremacy of will and reason. In each case, Rosario argues, the original culprit of deviant behavior was identified as the imagination--a perilous site beyond surveillance, highly susceptible to the salacious effects of literature, where irrational associations might take root and usurp the "reality" of conventional sexuality. What emerges most compellingly from Rosario's study is the anxiety produced by the erotic imagination and the elaborate, often desperate theoretical fabrications designed to contain it. Filled with extraordinary case studies and written in prose that is as lively and entertaining as it is insightful, this book offers both a history of the erotic imagination and its narrative expressions, as well as a fascinating mirror in which our contemporary ambivalence about sexuality--from the acrimonious rhetoric of family values to censorship of pornography and hostility towards gays--takes on surprising new significance.