Zola's Dream

Claire White is Associate Professor of French at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture (2014) and co-editor of The Labour of Literature in Britain and France (2018).

• Introduction: Zola and the Return of Idealism; 1. The Quarrel of the Idealists and the Naturalists; 2. The Politics of Impossibilism: Germinal; 3. S/Z: Le Rêve; 4. Doubting Thomas: Lourdes, Naturalism, and the Miracle; 5. On Being Right: Zola and Dreyfus; Epilogue: Idealism after the Act; Bibliography.

It is rare that an author as well studied as Zola-not to mention as central to European modernity-benefits from a new critical reading that totally shifts our perceptions of the work, of its meanings, and of its place in literary history. Claire White has achieved this extraordinary feat in Zola's Dream. Andrew Counter, Professor of Modern French Literature, University of Oxford