La bête humaine
By: Emile Zola ; translated, with an introduction and notes, by Roger Pearson.
Contributors: Pearson, Roger.
Series: The world's classics
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 372
ISBN-13: 9780192822611
Description: La Bete humaine (1890), the seventeenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, is one of Zola's most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of murder, passion, and possession, it is also a compassionate study of individuals derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control.

Zola considered this his 'most finely worked' novel, and in it he powerfully evokes life at the end of the Second Empire in France, where society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new locomotives and railways it was building. While expressing the hope that human nature evolves through education and gradually frees itself of the burden of inherited evil, he is constantly reminding us that under the veneer of technological progress there remains, always, the beast within.

This new translation captures Zola's fast-paced yet deliberately dispassionate style, while the introduction and detailed notes place the novel in its social, historical, and literary context.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [xlvi]-xlvii).
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: Note on the translation; title: Select bibliography; title: Chronology; title: La Bête Humaine; title: Explanatory notes