Emile Zola – Blood, Sex & Money: Naturalism, Narrative & Adaptation
- Submitting institution
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Royal Holloway and Bedford New College
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 31243696
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- BBC Radio 4
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first performance
- November
- Year of first performance
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- In 2015-16, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Emile Zola: Blood, Sex and Money, an adaptation of Zola’s 20-volume ‘Rougon-Macquart’ novel sequence. The series comprised 27 episodes over three seasons. Dan Rebellato was the leading writer: he proposed the project, organised the books thematically into seasons, set the style and approach that got it commissioned and produced. He was lead writer on seasons 1 and 3: he created story arcs, organised books into episodes, advised the other writers on style and approach. He wrote 7 episodes, including the feature-length first episode and finale. He made several public appearances discussing the series.
Research Imperatives
Research questions: (a) how can nineteenth-century Naturalist ideas about free will and determinism, morality and objectivity be explored creatively in the light of more recent philosophical and scientific debates? (b) How can the force and ambition of the original novels be reinvented for a twenty-first-century mass audience?
Research findings: (a) the scripts critique the naturalist-determinist (and, implicitly, the neuroscientific) view through various devices, inter alia introducing an identified (not omniscient) narrator; tensions between narrator and narrated; playfulness with narrative tropes of ‘inevitability’ (paralleling Naturalism’s ‘zombie’ problem [Rebellato 2018]); (b) Adapting the books as a single story over three seasons echoes Zola’s encompassing project and made possible cumulative thematic, stylistic continuities and complexities; formal decisions about casting and dialogue reinforced the contemporaneity of Zola’s questions; the creation of a participant narrator and extended metaphorical imagery exploited contradictions in Naturalism’s claims to objectivity (see Rebellato 2020). The episodes have been listened to 30 million times and the series won in the 2016 and 2017 BBC Radio/Audio Drama awards.
Rebellato’s scripts and the broadcast versions are submitted for assessment; additional contextual information includes 2 supporting research articles, development pack, and esteem indicators.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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