Title: The visual novel
First published: 1992
Description: The Visual Novel is the first comprehensive study of Zola based on the role of visual perception in his theories and works. The late nineteenth-century novel can be considered, in certain respects, as a visual art form. The Visual Novel attempts to develop and implement a visual methodology for approaching the novel, while undertaking a comprehensive study of Emile Zola's twenty-novel series, Les Rougon-Macquart, and suggesting relationships between Zola's work and that.

Of his contemporaries in painting, experimental psychology, and criticism. The author also analyzes three paintings from the impressionist period in detail and relates them to the handling of thematic content, viewpoint, and description in Zola's novels. William Berg traces the impact of vision in many of the major areas of novelistic endeavor: Zola's theories stress the key role of vision in the the experimental method. Optical instruments and effects, underscoring.

Important motif of "looking" (le regard), occupy a major place in the thematic content of Zola's novels. Viewpoint, central to Zola's program of narrational objectivity, is characterized by a multiplicity of perspectives, often crossing the conventional boundaries between the spaces of narrator, character, and reader. Descriptive passages reveal a progressive, perceptual style, where the hazy impression yields to the solid, material perception of reality, embodying the.

Crucial notion of determinism. Finally, Zola's figures, stimulated by external effects of light and color and shaped by the internal forces of fear and desire, lead us to locate the role of hallucination and visual imagination in the perceptual and creative processes. Berg then suggests parallels between Zola and other novelists of his time in each of the above areas, further demonstrating the visual nature of the cultural climate of late nineteenth-century France.
Subjects: History, Visual perception in literature, Art and literature, Art, Knowledge, Description (Rhetoric), Technique, Zola, emile, 1840-1902, French literature, history and criticism, 19th century, Knowledge and learning
Places: France
People: Emile Zola (1840-1902)
Time periods: 19th century