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IAS Book Launch 'Émile Zola: Life and Dream'
02 October 2025, 5:00 pm–7:00 pm
The IAS and the Centre for French and Francophone Research are pleased to host this triple book launch on the subject of Émile Zola.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Organiser
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Institute of Advanced Studies
Location
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IAS Common GroundG11, ground floor, South WingUCL, Gower St, LondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
We are pleased to welcome Robert Lethbridge (St Andrews, emeritus at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge), Claire White (Girton College, Cambridge), and Rachel Bowlby (UCL). Each of them has a book on Zola coming out in 2025.
Émile Zola: A Determined Life
by Robert Lethbridge
"This book explores Zola’s life and work and the ways in which these were determined by the traumatic history of his times. From humble beginnings, Zola's life was marked by the determination to succeed. Robert Lethbridge traces Zola's development as a writer, including the earliest texts and his novel-cycles, and further shows how Zola’s extraordinary creativity extended from his journalism to experiments in the theatre and even his own operatic adaptations of his novels. Lethbridge offers the reader new perspectives, informed by the most recent research, which bring together Zola’s writing and its historical context."
https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/mile-zola
Zola's Dream: Idealism on Trial
by Claire White
"Spanning the period from Zola's epic Germinal to his fateful intervention in the Dreyfus Affair, Zola's Dream is the first book to explore how the 'quarrel' between idealists and naturalists shaped the ambitions of the novel at the end of the nineteenth century, when differences over literary aesthetics invariably spoke of far-reaching cultural and political struggles."
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/zolas-dream/68967C428EA5A49EF1CD060F9C0856F9
Émile Zola: Writing Modern Life
by Rachel Bowlby
"An engaging and informative account of the work and life of Émile Zola. [Bowlby] offers new ways of thinking about Zola's representations of the settings and stories and character types of late nineteenth-century French life. [The book] explores the juxtaposition of intimate everyday life and public history, as seen in the letters Zola wrote from his exile in south London, during the Dreyfus affair."
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/mile-zola-9780198874126
All welcome. The discussion will be followed by a small drinks reception. Please register to attend: https://ias-emile-zola.eventbrite.co.uk
This event is supported by the IAS Book Launch Programme and has been organised by the Centre for French and Francophone Research. The centre provides a showcase for the diversity of French and Francophone studies in a global context across many disciplines at UCL, including literary studies, history, philosophy, art history, anthropology, global health, and the physical sciences. The goal is to create a space for researchers and students from across the university broadly interested in the French-speaking world to share their work and to promote interdisciplinary collaboration.
Image credit: Autoportraits d'Émile Zola, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
About the Speakers
Robert Lethbridge
Emeritus Professor at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
Professor Robert Lethbridge was Master of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge from 2005-2013. He was Provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust between 2010-2013. He is Emeritus Hon. Professor of nineteenth-century French Literature (University of Cambridge) and Emeritus Professor of French Language and Literature in the University of London. He is currently Hon. Professor in the University of St Andrews. Recent publications include a critical edition of Émile Zola’s Écrits sur l’art (Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2021) and Zola’s Painters (Cambridge, Legenda, 2022). In 2012, he was appointed by the French government as Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques for his career-length contributions to the cultural history of France.
More about Robert LethbridgeClaire White
Associate Professor of French at Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics, Cambridge
Claire White is Associate Professor of French and a Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge. She specialise in nineteenth-century French literature and art, and I have particular interests in class, labour politics, aesthetics, and intellectual history. Her first book, Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture (2014), explored how writers and artists of the early Third Republic engaged with burning issues of labour and leisure politics at a key moment in the history of class struggle in France. She is the co-editor of three publications: The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910: Authorial Work Ethics (2018); a special number of the leading journal on Émile Zola and Naturalism, Les Cahiers naturalistes (‘Zola au pluriel’, no. 91, 2017), and a special number of the journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, Dix-Neuf, on the poet Jules Laforgue (vol. 20, 2016).
More about Claire WhiteRachel Bowlby
Emeritus Professor at School of European Languages, Culture and Society, UCL
Rachel Bowlby is Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at University College London. Her work is focused on two main areas: literary realism, and the history and theory of consumer culture. These interests have been linked since her first book, Just Looking (1985), on novels about department stores. Other books on consumer culture include Shopping with Freud (1993), Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (2000), on supermarkets, and Back to the Shops: The High Street in History and the Future (2022). She has written on everyday life and its representations in Everyday Stories (2016) and on reproductive technologies and changing forms of parenthood in A Child of One's Own (2013). All her work is informed by psychoanalytic and deconstructive thinking, especially Feminist Destinations (1997) on Virginia Woolf, and Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities (2007). Talking Walking: Essays in Cultural Criticism (2018) and Unexpected Items (2024) are recent collections of essays. Rachel Bowlby has also translated several works of contemporary French philosophy, including two books by Jacques Derrida. She was elected as a Fellow to the British Academy in 2007 and in 2024 she was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.
More about Rachel Bowlby