Part 2: Gutenberg text and illustrated HTML.Part 1: Gutenberg text and illustrated HTML.Flaubert, Gustave, 1821-1880: Bouvard and Pécuchet: A Tragi-Comic Novel of Bourgeois Life (2 volumes with other short works by Flaubert in v9 and v10 of a collection of his works Chicago: S.multiple formats at some graphical elements blanked out.Flaubert, Gustave, 1821-1880: Bouvard and Pécuchet (London: H.Online books about this author are available, as is a Wikipedia article.

Online Books by Gustave Flaubert (Flaubert, Gustave, 1821-1880) Rejecting the modern world, he paradoxically became its celebrated chronicler and the most modern writer of his time.Gustave Flaubert (Flaubert, Gustave, 1821-1880) | The Online Books Page The Online Books Page An enemy of power who held no nostalgia for the monarchy or the church, he was nonetheless hostile to collectivist utopias.ĭespite declarations of the timelessness and sacredness of Art, Flaubert could not transcend the era he abominated. Nowhere are Flaubert’s contradictions more evident than in his politics. He prided himself on the impersonality of his writing, but he did not hesitate to use material from his own life in his fiction. The author of Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education spent his life inseparably bound to solitude and melancholy, yet he enjoyed periodic escapes from his “hole” in Croisset to pursue a variety of pleasures: fervent friendships, society soirées, and a whirlwind of literary and romantic encounters.

His loathing became a fixation-and a source of literary inspiration.įlaubert depicts a man whose personality, habits, and thought are a stew of paradoxes. Vulgar, ignorant, obsessed with material comforts, impervious to beauty, the French middle class embodied for Flaubert every vice of the democratic age. Wary of the masses, he rejected the universal male suffrage hard won by the Revolution of 1848, and he was exasperated by the nascent socialism that promoted the collective to the detriment of the individual. Flaubert did not welcome the egalitarian society predicted by Tocqueville. Michel Winock’s biography situates Gustave Flaubert’s life and work in France’s century of great democratic transition.