| Nana Contributor(s): Zola, Émile (Author), Constantine, Helen (Author), Nelson, Brian (Editor) |
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ISBN: 0198814267 ISBN-13: 9780198814269 Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA OUR PRICE: $11.66 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: June 2020 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Classics |
| Dewey: 843.8 |
| LCCN: 2019042372 |
| Physical Information: 0.87" H x 5.04" W x 7.64" (0.66 lbs) 432 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 19th Century - Cultural Region - French |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 'She was the golden beast, an unconscious force, the very scent of her could bring the world to ruin.' 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 elite, was la Ville Lumiere, 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. |