Böcker av Robert Lethbridge

Nuanced and insightful, a comprehensive exploration of the life, work, and times of the celebrated French literary polymath. Émile Zola is widely regarded as one of the world's greatest writers, whose reputation was reinforced by his historic intervention in the Dreyfus Affair. This book explores Zola's life and work and how these were determined by the traumatic history of his times. From humble beginnings, Zola's life was marked by the determination to succeed. Robert Lethbridge traces his development as a writer, including Zola's earliest texts and his novel cycles, and further shows how Zola's extraordinary creativity extended from his journalism to experiments in the theater and even to his own operatic adaptations of his novels. Lethbridge offers the reader new perspectives, informed by the most recent research, which bring together Zola's writing and its historical context.

As the author of the twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart series, Émile Zola enjoys a reputation as one of the greatest novelists of the 19th century: but his essays on painting, and in particular his early championing of Manet, mark him out also as one of the most significant art critics of the age. Zola's Painters is the first book to explore the entirety of this body of work in its own right: some 150 texts written over thirty years. Robert Lethbridge, editor of the new Classiques Garnier edition of this corpus (two-thirds of which he unearthed himself from the newspapers in which they original appeared), now offers a radical reevaluation of Zola's writing on contemporary artists. The novelist's approval of the Impressionists, for example, must be seen in the light of an equal admiration for the Old Masters, which sits uneasily with Zola's modernist credentials as they are celebrated by posterity.Robert Lethbridge is a Life Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and Emeritus Professor of French Language and Literature in the University of London. He is currently Hon. Professor at the University of St Andrews.