This volume brings together a series of essays by acknowledged experts on Flaubert. It offers a coherent overview of the writer's work and critical legacy, and provides insights into the very latest scholarly thinking. While a central place is given to Flaubert s most widely read texts, attention is also paid to key areas of the corpus that have tended to be overlooked. Close textual analyses are accompanied by discussion of broader theoretical issues, and by a consideration of Flaubert s place in the wider traditions that he both inherited and influenced. These essays provide not only a robust critical framework for readers of Flaubert, but also a fuller understanding of why he continues to exert such a powerful influence on literature and literary studies today. A concluding essay by the prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa examines Flaubert s legacy from the point of view of the modern novelist.

In this riveting landmark biography, Brown illuminates the life and career of the author of "Madame Bovary," shedding light on not only the novelist but also his milieu--the Paris and Normandy of the revolution of 1848 and of the Second Empire.

Israel Pelletier argues that "Trois contes" demands a different kind of reading which distinguishes it from "Madame Bovary" and other Flaubert texts. By the time he wrote this late work, Flaubert's attitude toward his characters and the role of fiction had changed to accommodate different social, political, and literary pressures. He constructed two opposing levels of meaning for each of the stories, straight and ironic, which produced a more fruitful way of addressing some of his concerns and assumptions about langauge and illusion. Included in this study are a provocative feminist reading of "Un Coeur," an assessment of "Saint Julien" as Flaubert's attempt to come to terms with his originality as a writer, and an interpretation of "Herodias" as an autobiography of the writing process.

Richly illustrated with maps, historical and contemporary photographs, and period artwork, this guidebook takes tourists and armchair travelers on a stimulating journey through the small towns, rolling hills, and windswept coast of Flaubert’s Normandy. The novelist’s homes and the locations that are prominently featured in his controversial works are the focus of this pictorial travel guide, and include the ancient town of Rouen, where Flaubert was born in 1821; the resort town of Trouville and its frequently painted beach; Croisset, where Flaubert’s riverside house gave him the refuge to write; and the quiet country town of Ry, which claims to be where the real Madame Bovary lived and died.

Romanticism and after in France is a series designed to publish research monographs or longer works of high quality whether by established scholars or recent graduates, dealing with French literature in the period from pre-Romanticism to the turn of the twentieth century.

An acknowledged master of translation, Francis Steegmuller has given us by far the most generous and varied selection of Flaubert's letters in English. He presents these with an engrossing narrative that places them in the context of the writer's life and times.

This book reveals the extensive and dynamic interplay between Les Tentations de saint Antoine and the rest of Flaubert's fiction. Mary Neiland combines two critical approaches, genetic and intertextual criticism, in order to trace the development of selected topoi and figures across the three versions of La Tentation and on through Flaubert's other major works. Each chapter is devoted to one of these centres of interest, namely, the banquet scene, the cityscape, the crowd, the seductive female and the Devil. Detailed study of these five areas exposes a remarkable intimacy between writings that appear at a far remove from each other. The networks of recurring images located demonstrate for the first time the obsessive nature of Flaubert's writing practice; the pursuit of these networks across his fictional writings exposes his developing technique; and La Tentation is revealed as both a privileged moment of expression and as a place of auto-reflection. This volume will be of interest to students and specialists of Flaubert as well as to those interested in genetic and intertextual criticism.

Although their styles appear remarkably different, Flaubert and Kafka share a common identification with the writing process itself. "I am a human pen," wrote Flaubert; "I am nothing but literature," declared Kafka. This stimulating book is the first to explore the link between these writers. Introducing his conception of psychopoetics, Charles Bernheimer brings new clarity to many controversial issues in psychoanalysis, rhetoric, and critical theory. In chapters on Flaubert and Kafka he probes the desires and fears motivating each writer's search for a fully satisfying literary style. His interpretation of the strategies the authors adopt to harness the negativity of writing reveals the creative function of such psychological phenomena as narcissism, fetishism, and sadomasochism. The major works, Bernheimer argues, dramatize the conflict between the structures of Eros and Thanatos, metonymy and metaphor, through which they are constituted. From this illuminating perspective he traces the genesis of each writer's mature style, analyzes two early works, La Tentation de saint Antoine and "The Judgment," and examines two late masterpieces, Bouvard et Pécuchet and The Castle, applying to the latter Walter Benjamin's description of the allegorical mode. This highly original work of theoretical criticism will interest not only readers of Flaubert and Kafka but all students of literary theory and the creative process.

A study of Gustave Flaubert's Un coeur simple (A simple heart) originally written in 1876 and published in 1877.