# Nana

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/emile-zola/nana/9780198814269

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- Book: [Nana](https://www.bookquiver.com/emile-zola/nana) ([Nana.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/emile-zola/nana.md))
- Authors: [Emile Zola](https://www.bookquiver.com/emile-zola)
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- ISBN: 978-01-9881-426-9
- Pages: 432
- Published: 2020-03-26
- Language: en_US
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

''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 much a result of the corruption of the Empire, as of rampant female sexuality.