French novelist ?mile Zola, noted for his championship of the Naturalist novel, has been one of the most adapted authors in world literature. There have been approximately 80 film adaptations of his late 19th century novels and short stories, many of which occurred during the silent era of international film production (1895?1927). While the aesthetic elements of Zola's fiction continue to appeal to international cinema, the author's thematic naturalism and his ?scientific methodology? have provided an ideological framework that incorporates art, science and history into the many cinematic adaptations of his work. This collection of essays, contributed by scholars of French literature and film, explores the dynamic relationship between Zola's fiction and its film adaptations, examining critically significant cinematic adaptations of Zola's novels from a variety of theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives. The 13 essays discuss the adaptation of Zola's works within the limitations of the silent cinema; the challenges posed by film censorship and the notoriety of the author's naturalist text; the ideological inflection given to Zola's working class narratives; and Zola's representation of women. Zola's works are placed within their respective historical contexts, as the essays address encoded anti?Nazi sentiment in films produced under the German occupation of France during World War II and the French Communist Party's reception of the filmic adaptation of Germinal. Other adapted works addressed in these chapters include La Terre, Nana, La B?te humaine, Au Bonheur des Dames, Th?r?se Raquin, Gervaise and Pot-Bouille.

Est-ce que la representation de la femme chez Zola, et dans la fiction naturaliste en general, enterine l'idee d'une permanence du feminin? Echappe-t-elle au contraire a toute figure, y compris au mythe de la diabolisation ou de l'exaltation, pour faire valoir une ambiguite, une indetermination qui correspondrait a l'effacement des sexes propre a la deuxieme moitie du XIXc siecle? C'est a une telle question que cet ouvrage s'attache a repondre dans le but de cerner une ecriture du feminin propre a la fiction naturaliste. L'ecriture du feminin est ici envisagee a la fois comme poetique de la representation, interpretation textuelle et discours conscient ou inconscient que la societe fait entendre sur la femme. Un tel discours n'echappe pas a l'hegemonie positiviste de son epoque qui legitime toute categorisation de la feminite. Parallelement, a l'etat de crise declenche par le progres scientifique et la peur face aux transformations qu'il engendre, fait des lors echo une hermeneutique du feminin comme metamorphose, ouverture et enigme. Does the representation of woman in Zola, and in naturalist fiction in general, confirm the notion of a permanence of the feminine; or, on the contrary, does it escape all tropes, including myths that demonize or exalt, in order to exploit its ambiguity or indeterminacy, and thereby correspond to the erasure of sex that characterizes cultural production during the second half of the nineteenth century? This is the question this work attempts to answer, in order to define and delimit the writing of the feminine in naturalist fiction. In this book, the inscription of the feminine is envisaged simultaneously as a poetics of representation, textualinterpretation, and conscious or unconscious discourse that society gives to understand about woman. Such a discourse fails to escape the positivist hegemony of the period that legitimizes the categorization of the feminine. Nevertheless, beyond this systemization of the concept of woman, the idea of scientific progress brings about the development of a generalized myth of transformation that gives rise to the anguish of incertitude, degeneracy, and emptiness. A hermeneutics of woman as metamorphosis, open-mindedness, and mystery echos this situation of crisis.