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: Edward Forman (University of Bristol), 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

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, …

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2280 words

Citation: Griffiths, Katherine Sian. "La Bête humaine". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 September 2008 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11320, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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