ABSTRACT
This chapter pays attention to historicity by exploring what connects Zola to the modernization of style and of sensibility that accelerates through the second half of the nineteenth century and anticipates the multiform, protean modernism of the twentieth century. Zola's fictional aristocrat ventures into the shadowlands of desire, where his curiosity is quickened by pangs of anxiety and finds its material correlative in the intriguing miscellany of redundant commercial premises. Zola's focus on subjectivities formed in the jostling spaces of modernity — and in vacant spaces — centres on the representation of the body, often under conditions of extreme stress. Zola's non-Naturalist representations of the body make forward connections to the embodied narratives of alienated subjectivity that are integral to much modernist literature and visual culture. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
