Zola's Dream

Émile Zola was the nineteenth century's pre-eminent naturalist writer and theoretician, spearheading a cultural movement that was rooted in positivist thought and an ethic of sober observation. As a journalist, Zola drove home his vision of a type of literature that described rather than prescribed, that anatomised rather than embellished – one that worked, in short, against idealism. Yet in the pages of his fiction, a complex picture emerges in which Zola appears drawn to the ideal—to the speculative, the implausible, the visionary – more than he liked to admit. Spanning the period from Zola's epic Germinal to his fateful intervention in the Dreyfus Affair, Zola's Dream is the first book to explore how the 'quarrel' between idealists and naturalists shaped the ambitions of the novel at the end of the nineteenth century, when differences over literary aesthetics invariably spoke of far-reaching cultural and political struggles.