French Literature Reviews - 2026

A. Gural-Migdal, The Written Screen of the Rougon-Macquart: Iconic and Filmic Conceptions of the Novel in Zola
Novel and Narrative Prose

Review published in Acta Fabula (November 2013, vol. 14, no. 8): “Zola's Visual & Cinematic Devices” by Jessy Neau.

Anna Gural-Migdal, The Written Screen of the Rougon-Macquart. Iconic and Filmic Conceptions of the Novel in Zola

with a preface by Alain Pagès

Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, “Littératures” series, 2012.

EAN 9782757403945

270p.

26EUR

Publisher's Description:

Émile Zola rightly foresaw that the 20^th century would be defined by the transition from the written word to the screen. And the writer's brilliance lay in placing the photographic act at the very heart of his conception of the novel, and in using the concept of the screen as an artistic idea and a worldview that anticipated cinema.
Furthermore, the novelist played an important role in the emergence of theoretical reflection on the image and film, not least through Eisenstein, who showed that cinema inherits the art that had emerged in literature with Zola, restoring its representational logic through the complementarity of icon and montage.
This book aims to shed new light on the orchestration of the image in Zola's fiction, capturing it both in its fragmented grasp of real space and its continuous movement through time. Might the constraints that representation imposes on itself in the Rougon-Macquart series be the very ones that also ground cinema, forcing the image into its condition of concrete visual presence and the unfolding of its projection, in order to open up new ways for it to exist otherwise?
The interdisciplinary approach of this study consists in using iconic and filmic data as methodological concepts to subsume different media, highlighting an artistic practice in Zola's work grounded in the naturalist experience, which could not exist without the visual apparatus of the frame and the screen.

The Author

Anna Gural-Migdal is a tenured Professor at the University of Alberta, where she teaches 19^th-century French literature and contemporary French cinema. She is a specialist in Émile Zola and naturalism. Her current research focuses on the various cinematic aspects of Zola's novels, the relationship between literary and filmic naturalism, and the representation of women in contemporary French cinema. She has published over a hundred articles on Zola and naturalism, 19^th- and 20^th-century French literature, and French, Italian, and Canadian cinema. She is currently the President of AIZEN® (International Association for Multidisciplinary Research and Comparative Studies on Zola and Naturalism) and
Editor-in-Chief of the international journal of naturalist studies, Excavatio.

Rooted in nineteenth-century French literature and naturalist aesthetics, this volume examines how Émile Zola anticipated twentieth-century visual culture long before the advent of motion pictures. The study situates Zola within the broader tradition of literary naturalism, highlighting how his writing engages with the nascent technologies of photography and optical projection. By exploring the complex interplay between written text and visual representation, the book contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions about media theory, intermediality, and the ways narrative prose absorbs the mechanics of the frame, the screen, and the moving image.

Scholars of nineteenth-century literature, film historians, and students of comparative media studies will find this interdisciplinary work especially valuable for rethinking the boundaries between literature and cinema. Anna Gural-Migdal applies iconic and filmic concepts as methodological tools to analyze how Zola structures space and time within the monumental Rougon-Macquart series. The book offers fresh perspectives on naturalist poetics and deepens our understanding of how nineteenth-century narrative techniques paved the way for modern cinematic language and visual representation.