Emile Zola, Pot-Bouille [Pot Luck]

Elisabeth Muelsch (Angelo State University)

Ed. by Nigel Harkness, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.5.2.05: French Writing and Culture: The Nineteenth-Century , 1800-1900.
Vol. editors: David Elwyn Evans (University of St Andrews), Edward Forman (University of Bristol), Elisabeth Gerwin (University of Lethbridge), Nigel Harkness (University of Newcastle upon Tyne), Tim Unwin (University of Bristol), David Williams (University of Sheffield), Jennifer Yee (University of Oxford)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1882

Places

France (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Naturalist
Novel

Resources

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Pot-Bouille

[

Potluck

] was serialized in

Le Gaulois

from 23 January to 14 April 1882 and published in volume form by Charpentier that same year. It is the tenth of the twenty novels in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, a series designed to portray French society during the Second Empire by following the fate of a fictional family.

Pot-Bouille

and its sequel,

Au bonheur des dames

[

The Ladies’ Paradise

] (1883), tell the story of the handsome and charming provincial Octave Mouret, son of Marthe Rougon and Francois Mouret, a man with a passion for women and business, who comes to Paris as a twenty-two-year-old to make his fortune. Yet

Pot-Bouille

is also a story about life in an apartment building in the rue de Choiseul, a building Zola had designed as the bourgeois counter piece to the…

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2693 words

Citation: Muelsch, Elisabeth. "Pot-Bouille". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 August 2015 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11314, accessed 23 April 2024.]

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Emile Zola, Pot-Bouille [Pot Luck]

Dates

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