Balzac to Zola: Selected Short Stories (French Texts): 19th Century Short Stories

by Richard Hobbs (Editor), R. Hobbs (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  1998

  $28.63

  Nineteenth-century French short stories were devoured by their readers
  with an insatiable appetite. A reading public that was itself expanding
  rapidly, as education and leisure opportunities grew, created an
  unprecedented demand for short fiction. Writers quickly responded to
  this; it was a lucrative market, and at the same time it offered the
  intrinsic artistic challenge of brevity. From Romanticism to Naturalism
  and beyond, novelists such as Balzac and Zola explored the potential of
  the short story as an alternative form to the novel in depicting modern
  life. The poetic intensity of 'contes fantastiques' in the manner of
  Poe's mysterious and cruel tales was championed by Baudelaire. Flaubert
  showed that short story fiction could be a serious as well as popular
  literary form. Specialists of the short story emerged, such as Merimee
  and Maupassant.