TY - JOUR
AU - Lethbridge, Robert
AB - Book Reviews 395 French Studies Émile Zola: A Very Short Introduction. By Brian Nelson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xix + 140. £8.99. Everything about Zola is lengthy: the 15 volumes of his Œuvres complètes (Cercle du livre précieux, 1966–70) are only one compendious example; his letters published to date (Montreal University Press, 1978–2010) fill 11 enormous tomes; Henri Mitterand’s definitive biography (Fayard, 3 vols., 1999–2002) covers 3000 pages. And as for the secondary literature devoted to his work, the 10,000 items registered by 1980 seem like the mere preliminaries to the exponential increase in such studies over the last 40 years. It makes it all the more remarkable that Brian Nelson has suc- cessfully risen to the challenge of distilling the various dimensions of Zola’s career and the sheer profusion of his writing into a set of introductory perspectives which explain why he remains one of the giants of nineteenth-century European culture. And Nelson argues that to limit his importance to that particular context is to ignore the extent to which ‘Zola is the quintessential novelist of modernity’ (p. 1), by virtue of the intensity of his focus on the dynamics of an emerging capitalist society. One 
TI - Book Review: Brian Nelson: Émile Zola: A Very Short Introduction
JF - Journal of European Studies
DO - 10.1177/0047244120969442d
DA - 2020-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/sage/book-review-brian-nelson-mile-zola-a-very-short-introduction-Q8lwwEl8r0
SP - 395
EP - 395
VL - 50
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -