Castigated from the outset for offending against public decency, Madame Bovary has rarely failed to provoke controversy, and appears here with an Introduction by Roger Clark, University of Kent at Canterbury, translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling. Flaubert’s own contemporaries were drawn to his meticulous account of provincial life, even though for the novelist himself the subject matter mattered less than his anguished pursuit of aesthetic perfection; twentieth-century readers, in turn, have come to see the formal experiments underlying Madame Bovary as anticipating the innovations of contemporary fiction. At the centre of it all sits Emma Bovary, a figure who has never stopped fascinating readers – romantic heroine or middle-class neurotic, flawed wife and mother or passionate rebel against bourgeois convention, at once the object of Flaubert’s admiration and the target of his irony, she remains one of fiction’s most enigmatic creations. Between Flaubert’s meticulous craftsmanship, his rendering of contemporary reality, and his unforgettable cast of characters, Madame Bovary stands as one of the major landmarks of modern fiction.
ISBN 13: 9781853260780
Author: Gustave Flaubert
