Zola, E: Therese Raquin

en Limba Engleză Paperback – 14 sep 2010

Therese Raquin is the story of a young woman mired in a loveless marriage to a sickly, self-centered man. Trapped in a house owned by her pitiless mother-in-law, she yearns for love and escape. She finds it in the arms of her husband's best friend--and the only way they can find happiness is through murder. What follows is the stuff of nightmares. Emile Zola's story is as vibrant today as it was when it was written 150 years ago. Scorned by critics for the perversity and violence of his characters, Zola nonetheless went on to be one of the greatest and most popular writers in the history of literature. Soon to be a Major Motion Picture, Therese Raquin is a compelling and modern story of guilt and its consequences. This edition is amplified by an important introduction by Stephen R. Pastore, one of the world's leading Zola scholars and the addition of material for use by Book Discussion Groups as well as the Movie Tie-In edition.

Citește tot Restrânge

Notă biografică

Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist, journalist, critic, and one of the central figures of literary naturalism. Best known for the twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart cycle, Zola brought an ambitious social, political, and scientific seriousness to the nineteenth-century novel, examining how heredity, environment, class, labour, money, sexuality, and institutions shape human life. His fiction often focused on the forces that polite society preferred not to see: poverty, exploitation, alcoholism, prostitution, industrial danger, political corruption, and the pressure of economic power on ordinary families.Born in Paris and raised partly in Aix-en-Provence, Zola became one of the most influential and controversial writers of modern France. Novels such as Thérèse Raquin, L'Assommoir, Nana, Germinal, La Bête humaine, and La Débâcle helped define naturalist fiction through their detailed social observation, unsentimental realism, and willingness to confront the physical and moral conditions of modern life. Germinal, his great novel of coal miners and class struggle, is among his most enduring works and remains a cornerstone of French literature, labour fiction, and the European realist tradition. Zola was also a major public intellectual, famously intervening in the Dreyfus Affair with "J'Accuse...!", an act that confirmed his place not only in literary history but in the history of political conscience.

Textul de pe ultima copertă

'Therese Raquin' is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere 'human beasts' who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. 'Therese Raquin' stands as a key early manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which Zola was the founding father. Even today, this novel has lost none of its power to shock.