ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book sets out to articulate the discussion of Massin Zola's century-crossing modernity through a fresh reading of corporeality in the Rougon-Macquart series. It shows that how Zola's qualified enthusiasm for material modernity informs his culture critique, and shapes his innovative writerly responses to altered cultural and aesthetic conditions. The book addresses more specifically the question of Zola's modernist rhetoric in an extended study of textuality that focused on the body as a metaphor for the corpus of writing in the Rougon-Macquart. It argues that the tension between totalizing and fragmenting impulses is evidence of the struggle whereby the teleological project of omniscient Naturalism is pressured from within by a modernist drive to equivocation, to enfolding, to fracture, and to dissolution. The book also sets out an expansive concept of the social body that embraces symbolic values and their material manifestations.
