Zola's Dream
Idealism on Trial

Presents a bold and compelling case for Émile Zola, nineteenth-century naturalist par excellence, as an important thinker of the ideal.

Claire White (Author)

9781009576680, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 August 2025

304 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.1 cm, 0.58 kg

'By reading Zola's late novels against the grain to expose their suppressed idealism, Claire White brilliantly demonstrates the centrality of literary debates in the history of the Third Republic.  A must-read for scholars of literature and history alike.' Maurice Samuels, Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French, Yale University

Émile Zola was the nineteenth century's pre-eminent naturalist writer and theoretician, spearheading a cultural movement that was rooted in positivist thought and an ethic of sober observation. As a journalist, Zola drove home his vision of a type of literature that described rather than prescribed, that anatomised rather than embellished—one that worked, in short, against idealism. Yet in the pages of his fiction, a complex picture emerges in which Zola appears drawn to the ideal—to the speculative, the implausible, the visionary—more than he liked to admit. Spanning the period from Zola's epic Germinal to his fateful intervention in the Dreyfus Affair, Zola's Dream is the first book to explore 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.

Introduction: Zola and the Return of Idealism
1. The Quarrel of the Idealists and the Naturalists
2. The Politics of Impossibilism: Germinal
3. S/Z: Le Rêve
4. Doubting Thomas: Lourdes, Naturalism, and the Miracle
5. On Being Right: Zola and Dreyfus
Epilogue: Idealism after the Act
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]