Roman expérimental, Le. A collection of articles by Zola, published 1880 and containing his essay on the ‘experimental novel’, his most forceful statement of his belief that the methods of the biological sciences should be applied to the field of literature. Zola's famous essay abounds in quotations and paraphrases from Claude Bernard's Introduction à la médecine expérimentale (1865). Critics long ago dismissed Zola's arguments as untenable, but more recently the polemical and rhetorical force of this attempt to produce a theory of Naturalism has come to be appreciated more.
[David Baguley]
