The Beast Within

Émile Zola

Nov 2007 · Penguin UK

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La Bete humaine (1890), the seventeenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, is one of Zola's most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of murder, passion, and possession, it is also a compassionate study of individuals derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control. Zola considered this his 'most finely worked' novel, and in it he powerfully evokes life at the end of the Second Empire in France, where society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new locomotives and railways it was building. While expressing the hope that human nature evolves through education and gradually frees itself of the burden of inherited evil, he is constantly reminding us that under the veneer of technological progress there remains, always, the beast within.

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Emile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist and critic, the founder of the Naturalist movement in literature. Among Zola's most important works is his famous Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871-1893), which included such novels as L'Assomoir (1877), about the suffering of the Parisian working-class, Nana (1880), dealing with prostitution, and Germinal (1885).


Roger Whitehouse has taught at the Sorbonne and at Bolton Institute, where he is a research fellow.