Emile Zola, La Bête humaine [The Human Beast]

Katherine Sian Griffiths (Cardiff University)

Ed. by Tim Unwin, University of Bristol
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.5.2.05: French Writing and Culture: The Nineteenth-Century , 1800-1900.
Vol. editors: David Elwyn Evans (University of St Andrews), Edward Forman (University of Bristol), Elisabeth Gerwin (University of Lethbridge), Nigel Harkness (University of Newcastle upon Tyne), Tim Unwin (University of Bristol), David Williams (University of Sheffield), Jennifer Yee (University of Oxford)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1890

Places

France (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Naturalist
Novel

Resources

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La Bête humaine

is the seventeenth of the twenty novels making up Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, the series designed to map the fate of a fictional family under the Second Empire in France. It was serialised in

La Vie populaire

between November 1889 and March 1890 before being published in volume form by Charpentier in March 1890. Born of Zola’s desire to write two separate novels, one focussing on crime and the other on the world of railways,

La Bête humaine

merges both themes, using a train route as the setting for a tale of sex, murder, political corruption and judicial incompetence. Zola’s novel, as Henri Mitterand points out, immediately sparked very conflicting responses. Lombroso commented on the verisimilitude of Zola’s description of the criminal mind, whilst…

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2280 words

Citation: Griffiths, Katherine Sian. "La Bête humaine". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 September 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11320, accessed 31 October 2024.]

Emile Zola, La Bête humaine [The Human Beast]

Dates

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Resources

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