First published in 1990. Balzac, Zola and Faulkner all drew upon the principles of evolutionary theory to represent man’s place in nature and his struggle for survival in their major series
La Comèdie humaine, Rougon-Macquart
and the Yoknapatawpha fiction. This book focuses on the ‘first’ novels in each author’s series (
La Père Goriot, La Fortune des Rougon
and
Flags in the Dust
) and considers how each novel relates to its series and derives a definition of the naturalistic
roman-fleuve.
To describe this development, the issues of how a scientific idea becomes refracted in a literary genre and how the naturalistic novel developed out of the realistic novel are considered.