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Nana, PDF eBook

Nana PDF

Edited by Brian Nelson

Part of the Oxford World's Classics series

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'She was the golden beast, an unconscious force, the very scent of her could bring the world to ruin.'Nana, daughter of a drunk and a laundress, is the Helen of Troy of Paris.

A sexually magnetic high-class prostitute and actress, she becomes a celebrity, rapidly conquering society, ruining all men who fall under her spell-especially Count Muffat, Chamberlain to the Empress.

Nana herself meets a terrible fate, consumed by her own dissipation and extravagance, just as the disastrous war with Prussia is declared. Nana is the ninth instalment in the twenty volume Rougon-Macquart series.

The novel opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan élite, was la Ville Lumière, the glittering setting-and object-of Zola's scathing denunciation of society's hypocrisy and moral corruption.

Nana comes to symbolize the Second Empire regime itself in all its excesses; but in the final chapters, the narrator seems to suggest that the coming disaster is not so mucha result of the corruption of the Empire, as of rampant female sexuality.

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