His Excellency
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Summary
His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] by Émile Zola
Author: Zola, Émile, 1840-1902,Language: English, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Feb 27, 2018
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart series who want to fill in its political strand
- Readers studying nineteenth-century French political history and naturalist literature
- Readers who can accept lengthy political discussion and prefer panoramic social novels
Not a good fit for
- General fiction readers who prefer fast-paced plots and have little patience for politics
- Readers new to Zola who have not yet read other works in the series
- Readers who need a Chinese translation and are not used to reading English public-domain editions
Reading tips
- First learn about Second Empire politics and the Rougon-Macquart family tree, then enter the book's web of characters.
- Trace Rougon's rise on a separate timeline and observe how Zola advances political intrigue through scenes.
- Slow down where political discussion is dense, mark the author's judgments on how power works, and revisit them after finishing.
- If possible, compare with other works in the series to see how Zola places the same family in different social spheres.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Can I read this without having read other works in Les Rougon-Macquart?
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About the author
Émile Zola (1840–1902) was a French novelist, critic and political activist, one of the most prominent French writers of the late nineteenth century and the founder of the theory of naturalism. Through his twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart he constructed a vast social panorama, with representative works including Germinal, L'Assommoir, Au Bonheur des Dames and La Bête humaine. These works often take workers, peasants and ordinary city people as their protagonists, presenting poverty, labour and desire with meticulous observation and an almost documentary style, calm yet powerful. During the Dreyfus Affair Zola published the famous open letter J'Accuse, intervening in public affairs as an intellectual in the cause of justice. The library holds 93 of his works, including several translations.
