Evolution, Sacrifice, and Narrative

Download or read book Evolution, Sacrifice, and Narrative written by Carol Colatrella and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.