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  1. Home
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  3. Flaubert's Characters
  • Cited by 10
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
October 2011
Print publication year:
1985
Online ISBN:
9780511897665
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511897665
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, Literary Theory, European Literature, European Studies
Series:
Cambridge Studies in French (8)
Information

Book description

This major new study takes issue both with the traditional critical view that Flaubert's central characters are weak and with the approach adopted by a number of contemporary critics who claim that character is deliberately undermined in the interests of non-representational writing. Rather, Dr Knight explores the relationship between the contents of Flaubert's stories and his practice as a writer, thereby reinstating the functional value of character in his work. She shows that essential aspects of Flaubert's aesthetic - the opaqueness of language, stupidity, fascination and reverie as the object of art - depend on the psychological make-up of fictional characters: their pathological relationship to language and reality mirrors Flaubert's conception of the readers' stupefied response to his own stylistic effects and to his wilfully naive stories. Flaubert emerges as a representational writer, but one who is supremely self-conscious of the fictional status of his representations.

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