Search results for "Les Rougon-Macquart"

Zola «onomaturge»: le sens et la portée symbolique des anthroponymes dans "Les Rougon-Macquart"

2016

Throughout the twenty volumes of his monumental novel series, Emile Zola carefully chose his characters’ family names and given names, looking for clues in authentic documents or inventing some new anthroponyms himself. The main principle of the relation between a character and his/her family name is the name’s meaning and the symbolical significance hidden in its phonetic and semantic structure. As far as the given names are concerned, their choice usually seems to be determined by irony, the writer’s favorite literary technique.