Nana
Zola, Émile, 1840-19022020
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Nana, daughter of a drunk and a laundress, is the Helen of Troy of Paris. A sexually magnetic high-class prostitute and actress, she becomes a celebrity, rapidly conquering society, ruining all men who fall under her spell-especially Count Muffat, Chamberlain to the Empress. Nana herself meets a terrible fate, consumed by her own dissipation and extravagance, just as the disastrous war with Prussia is declared. Nana is the ninth instalment in the twenty volume Rougon-Macquart series. The novel opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan lite, was la Ville Lumire, the glittering setting-and object-of Zola's scathing denunciation of society's hypocrisy and moral corruption. Nana comes to symbolize the Second Empire regime itself in all its excesses; but in the final chapters, the narrator seems to suggest that the coming disaster is not so much a result of the corruption of the Empire, as of rampant female sexuality.
Main title:
Nana / Emile Zola.
Author:
Edition:
Second edition / edited by Brian Nelson ; translated by Helen Constantine.
Imprint:
Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2020.
Collation:
432 pages ; 20 cm
Notes:
Translated from the French.
ISBN:
9780198814269 (pbk)
Dewey class:
843.8
Language:
EnglishFrench
Subject:
BRN:
2522592
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