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Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) is considered to be one of the most important French novelists of the nineteenth century. He's most well known for his novel Madame Bovary, and for his desire to write "a book about nothing," a novel in which all external elements, especially the presence of the author, have been eliminated, leaving nothing but style itself. Often considered a member of the naturalist school, Flaubert despised categorizations of this sort, and in novels like Bouvard and Pécuchet demonstrates the inaptness of this label. In addition to these two novels, he is also the author of A Sentimental Education, Salambo, Three Tales, and The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Margaret Cohen is Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford University. Her publications include The Sentimental Education of the Novel and Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, as well as the co-edited collections Spectacles of Realism-Body, Gender, Genre and The Literary Channel: The Inter-national Inventions of the Novel. She has also translated and edited Sophie Cottin's Claire d'Albe (1799). |
