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Literary Reference Center
Novels, short stories, poems, plot summaries and synopses, and literary criticism. Research guides, lesson plans, and citation tools support student learning.
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Description
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....
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Émile Zola was one of the most important, though controversial, French novelists of the late nineteenth century, and founder of the Realist movement. In 1871 Zola began to write his most notable series of novels, the "Rougon-Macquart Novels", that relate the history of a fictional family under the Second Empire. As a strict naturalist, Zola was greatly concerned with science, especially the problems of evolution and heredity vs. environment. However,...
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English
Description
The Beast Within (1890) is a novel by French author Émile Zola. The seventeenth of twenty volumes of Zola's monumental Les Rougon-Macquart series is an epic story of family, politics, class, and history that traces the disparate paths of several French citizens raised by the same mother. Spanning the entirety of the French Second Empire, Zola provides a sweeping portrait of change that refuses to shy away from controversy and truth as it gets to...