Tying up the Loose Ends of an Epoch

From a documentary perspective, which assumes that literature is part of the historical record, novels have long been used by historians. This is a quite traditional approach, theoretically unsophisticated but often evocative and enriching, because of a novel's referential functions-the way it serves as a window on life or developments in the past.' Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, subtitled Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire, has been an invaluable source for historians of nineteenth-century France. Zola prepared massive dossiers for each of his twenty volumes, often carried out on-site research, and examined many varieties of history besides the familial-political, military, labor, urban, and economic-to name a few. Germinal (Volume XIII, 1885), Zola's most famous novel, has pride of place in historians' citations, and its use in undergraduate history courses has even been discussed in the Teaching History To

Epoch (astronomy · Operating system · Pascal (unit · Programming language · Tying · Computer Science · French Historical and Cultural Studies · French Literature and Criticism · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History