Balzac to Zola: Selected Short Stories

Nineteenth-century French short stories were devoured by their readers with an insatiable appetite. A reading public that was itself expanding rapidly, as education and leisure opportunities grew, created an unprecedented demand for short fiction. Writers quickly responded to this; it was a lucrative market, and at the same time it offered the intrinsic artistic challenge of brevity. From Romanticism to Naturalism and beyond, novelists such as Balzac and Zola explored the potential of the short story as an alternative form to the novel in depicting modern life. The poetic intensity of 'contes fantastiques' in the manner of Poe's mysterious and cruel tales was championed by Baudelaire. Flaubert showed that short story fiction could be a serious as well as popular literary form. Specialists of the short story emerged, such as Merimee and Maupassant.