Volume 4, Issue 3, December 2013

A Word From the Editor

In this issue you will find a review of Robert Harris’s new novel An Officer and a Spy, set during the Dreyfus Affair and told from Colonel Picquart’s perspective. Julie Kalman explains where fiction and history mesh and where they cannot. Michael Miller revisits the birth of the department store with expert reviews of Zola’s novel, Au bonheur des dames (Ladies’ Paradise) and its BBC adaptation, The Paradise. Mark Micale, historian of psychiatry, completes the theme begun in the last issue, enthusiastically tackling a trio of films about “mad female artists,” Aloise, Séraphine, and Camille Claudel 1915.

Happy holidays and happy reading and viewing.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

 

 

Table of Contents

The Buzz

Revisiting the Dreyfus Affair: Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy, by Julie Kalman

Maybe Missed

Mad Women Artists: Séraphine, Camille Claudel 1915, Aloïse, by Mark S. Micale

Classics in the Classroom

The Birth of the Department Store: Émile Zola’s Au bonheur des dames and BBC’s The Paradise miniseries, by Michael Miller