Dr Claire White

Claire specialises in nineteenth-century French literature and art, with a particular interest in class, labour politics, aesthetics, and intellectual history.

She is the author of Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). This book explores how writers and artists of the early Third Republic engaged critically with cultural, political and economic discourses on labour, leisure, and time at a key moment in the history of class struggle in France. She is also the co-editor of three publications: The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910: Authorial Work Ethics, with Marcus Waithe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); a special number of the leading journal on Zola and Naturalism, Les Cahiers naturalistes, with Nick White (‘Zola au pluriel’, no. 91, 2017); and a special number of the journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, Dix-Neuf, on the poet Jules Laforgue, with Sam Bootle (vol. 20, 2016). Her work has been awarded the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Larry Schehr Memorial Award  and the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes’ Publication Prize.

Her latest book, Zola’s Dream: Idealism on Trial, appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2025. Spanning the period from Zola's epic Germinal (1885) to his fateful intervention in the Dreyfus Affair, the book explores 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. Claire’s blog post for CUP gives a brief introduction.

Claire is currently working on two new projects. The first, as editor, of a book for Cambridge UP, George Sand in Context. The second is a monograph focusing on peasant and working-class writers from the turn of the twentieth century, including Émile Guillaumin and Charles-Louis Philippe.

From 2019 to 2023 Claire was Associate Editor of the North American journal, Nineteenth-Century French Studies.

Claire has supervised PhD theses by Ellie Stefiuk (on anarchism and the short story in fin-de-siècle France) and Ellamae Lepper (on hospitality and the Salon in July Monarchy fiction). She is currently supervising Isabel Maloney’s doctoral research on cultures of censorship under the Third Republic. Claire welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research interests relevant to her own.

Published works: 

Books (authored and edited):

Zola’s Dream: Idealism on Trial (Cambridge University Press, 2025)

The Labour of Literature in Britain and France: Authorial Work Ethics, ed. Marcus Waithe and Claire White (Palgrave, 2018).

Work and Leisure in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture: Time, Politics and Class (Palgrave, 2014).

Articles and Chapters:

'The People's Politics: Jean Béraud at the Salle Graffard', forthcoming in Art History.

'État présent: Émile Zola', French Studies, 79:4 (2025), 682-704

‘Pour la loi du nombre: George Sand et la République des paysans’, in Lendemains de défaite: 1870-1871 dans l’imaginaire de la IIIe République, ed. Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier & Nicholas White (Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2024), pp. 103-15.

‘The Stench of the People: On the Mania for Zola’s L’Assommoir’, in Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work and Impressionism (Yale University Press, 2023), pp. 87-101.

‘The Affair Before the Affair: Zola, Dreyfus and the Lourdes Scandal’, French History, 35: 3 (2021), 375-97.

'Back to her Sheep: The Commune and Peasant Politics in George Sand's Nanon', Nineteenth-Century French Studies (special number on the Paris Commune), 49 (2021),​ 460-76.

‘The Republic of Novels: Politics and Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction’, in The Cambridge History of the Novel in French, ed. by Adam Watt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 403-20. 

'Zola et Gissing: le Demos des deux côtés de la Manche', Les Cahiers naturalistes, 94 (2020), 131-42.

‘Patrie, peuple, amitié: George Sand and Jules Michelet on the Politics of Friendship’, Romanic Review, 110.1-4 (2019), 149-67.

‘George Sand, Digging’, in The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, ed. Waithe and White (2018), pp. 61-78.

‘Zola à rebours’, Les Cahiers naturalistes, 91 (2017), 123-34.

‘Laforgue, Beauvoir, and the Second Sex’, Dix-Neuf, 20 (2016), 110-24.

‘Easy Reading: Zola’s Kitsch’, in Lucidity: Essays in Honour of Alison Finch, ed. Ian James and Emma Wilson (Legenda: 2016), pp. 72-85.

‘Work Avoidance: Idleness and Ideology in Turn-of-The-Century Utopian Fiction’, Nottingham French Studies, 55 (2016), 46-61.

‘Sensuous Communism: Sand with Marx’, Comparative Literature, 67 (2015), 62-78; winner of the SDN Publication Prize.

‘Naturalism in extremis: Zola’s Le Rêve’, Romance Studies, 33 (2015), 272-84.

‘Zola and Freud: Spent Energy in Thérèse Raquin’, Romanic Review, 102:4 (2011), 349-68.

‘Labour of Love: George Sand’s La Ville noire and Émile Zola’s Travail’, Modern Language Review, 106 (2011), 697-708.

‘Rewriting Work and Leisure in Émile Zola’s Travail’, Dix-Neuf, 13 (2009), 55-70.