We are delighted to share the news that Dr Claire White, Associate Professor of French in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, and Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, has published her new book, Zola’s Dream: Idealism on Trial, with Cambridge University Press.
The study takes as its starting point Émile Zola’s Le Rêve (The Dream), first published in 1888, a work which baffled many of Zola’s readers at the time. With its apparently innocent fairytale quality, Le Rêve stood in sharp contrast to Zola’s preceding novel, La Terre, notorious for its scandalous depiction of peasant life. Critics accused Zola of inconsistency, even duplicity. One famously remarked: “M. Zola must make up his mind: he cannot be at once Zola and something other than Zola.”
Dr White’s book revisits this apparent contradiction in Zola’s career. Through close readings of four key novels — Germinal (1885), Le Rêve (1888), Lourdes (1893), and Vérité (1902) — she examines how Zola engaged with “idealism”: not simply as a foil for his naturalism, but as a mode of thought and writing that continued to attract him, even offering possible solutions to the social and political questions that preoccupied him.
In doing so, Zola’s Dream casts a new light on Zola’s late career and on the broader cultural history of the late nineteenth century, a period in which naturalism and idealism were understood not only as literary categories but as rival worldviews.
Read more about the book on the Cambridge University Press website.
Dr White has also written a blog post for CUP reflecting on the project: The Two Zolas.
