Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

1985

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Hokenson, Jan W.

Abstract

Emile Zola 's Rougon-Macguart novels describe the essential corruption of the Second Empire. In the cycle of novels, this epoch of rapid industrialization, before it ended in the Franco-Prussian debacle of 1871, enriched th e entrepreneurial Rougon branch but brutalized the proletarian Macquart branch of Zola's socially symbolic family. The majority of critics, past and present, either neglect or regret one major aspect of Zola's fictional portrayal of the period: the cumulative animal and machine imagery in the cycle's meticulously prepared settings, diction, epithets, and names. Such intricate veins of imagery constitute Zola''s architectonic symbolism. And the author's didactic sub-texts, especially in Le Ventre de paris, L'Assommoir, Nana, Germinal, and La Bete humaine, give the cycle its universality and its humanistic power.

Extent

176 p.

Comments

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 1985.|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

Identifier

FADT14274

Format

pdf

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