The Dream cover

The Dream

Rating 4.1
Word count
407K words
Chapters
41

Tags

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Le Rêve by Émile ZolaAuthor: Zola, Émile, 1840-1902,Language: French, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Jan 16, 2006

Editor's review

Le Rêve is a distinctive novel by Émile Zola, the great French Naturalist, and one of the volumes in his vast Les Rougon-Macquart cycle. Unlike the realistic, critical tone common in Zola's work, this book is steeped in dreamlike, poetic atmosphere: the heroine Angélique is innocent and devout, and her longing for love intertwines with her belief in miracles, unfolding the novel in religious coloring and romantic imagination. With delicate strokes Zola depicts embroidery craft, church ceremonies, and life in aristocratic mansions, while still retaining his customary social observation, presenting a love affair that crosses class lines amid stark wealth disparity. The original text is in French, elegant and fluent, making it an excellent work for literary lovers to discover the diversity of Zola's writing as well as a fine text for studying French and nineteenth-century French literature. Reading it, one feels both the tension between ideal and reality and the author's meditation on beauty and faith.

Who it's for

A good fit for

  • Readers who can read the French original and wish to study nineteenth-century French literature
  • Literature lovers with a strong interest in Zola and his family-cycle novels
  • Readers drawn to the blend of religious themes and romantic coloring
  • Learners who want to improve their French reading through classic literature

Not a good fit for

  • Readers with no knowledge of French who depend on translations
  • Readers expecting Zola's typical critical realism and averse to lyrical tone
  • Readers who prefer fast-paced plots and lack patience for lyrical description

Reading tips

  1. First learn the background of the Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, then read this book within that context.
  2. Pay attention to the descriptions of embroidery, churches, and festival scenes, and appreciate the author's symbolic technique.
  3. Readers with weaker French can read chapter by chapter alongside a dictionary or a translation for comparison.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

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

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41

FAQ

In what language is this eBook edition?
The Project Gutenberg edition of Le Rêve is the original French text, suitable for readers with some French reading ability or learners who wish to study French literature in the original.
Is this book stylistically the same as Zola's other works?
Not entirely. Zola is known for Naturalism, but Le Rêve, while retaining social observation, incorporates religious coloring and dreamlike poetry, making it one of the more lyrical and gentle works in the cycle.
On which devices can the eBook be read?
Project Gutenberg eBooks are available in plain text and other formats and can be read free of charge on computers, phones, e-readers, and other devices that support those formats.

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About the author

Émile Zola Author · French · 1840–1902

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.

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