The Letters of Gustave Flaubert : 1830-1880Author :
Paperback
Published : Tuesday 26 September 2023
Description
“If there is one article of faith that dominates the Credo of Gustave Flaubert’s correspondence,” Francis Steegmuller writes in the introduction to this selection of Flaubert’s letters, “it is that the function of great art is not to provide ‘answers.’” The Letters of Gustave Flaubert is above all a record of the intransigent questions—personal, political, artistic—with which Flaubert struggled throughout his life.
Here we have Flaubert’s youthful, sensual outpourings to his mistress, the poet Louise Colet, and, as he advances, still unknown, into his thirties, the wrestle to write Madame Bovary. We hear, too, of his life-changing trip to Egypt, as described to family and friends, and then there are lively exchanges with Baudelaire, with the influential critic Sainte-Beuve, and with Guy de Maupassant, his young protégé. Flaubert’s letters to George Sand reveal her as the great confidante of his later years.
Steegmuller’s book, a classic in its own right, is both a splendid life of Flaubert in his own words and the ars poetica of the master who laid the foundations for modern writers from James Joyce to Lydia Davis. Originally issued in two volumes, the book appears here for the first time under a single cover.
You may also like ...
by
Hardback
23 Feb 1993
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
€25.74
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
by
Paperback
14 Dec 1991
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
€12.86
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
by
Paperback
26 Sep 2023
Literature: history and criticism
€26.91
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
by
Paperback
16 Jan 2024
Classic fiction: general and literary
€19.88
Extended stock – Dispatch 5-7 days
Reviews