Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

Quotation

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Books

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Research

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Biographical

French novelist. Flaubert's novels are perhaps the most well-crafted of any of the French realists (Compare Honore de Balzac and Guy de Maupassant). He would occasionally spend an entire night writing to find that he had only composed a few sentences. This explains his exceedingly small output. His greatest and most famous work is undoubtedly Madame Bovary (1857). This novel describes the disenchantment of the French bourgeois. Other noted works of his include Salammbo (1862), a historical novel set in ancient Carthage, L'Education Sentimentale (1869) and La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874). Among his friends were writers Georges Sand, Maupassant, Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt.

Realism

The word "realism" is used with different meanings in many fields - philosophy, art, and literature, for example. Each have movements or schools characterized by the name "realism". In the visual arts and literature, realism is a middle 19th century movement which started in France. The realists sought to render accurately everyday characters, situations, and dilemmas. Realism began as a reaction to romanticism, in which subjects were treated idealistically. The movement is anticipated by the work of the French author Stendhal.

But the "father" of realism is generally thought to be Honore de Balzac. His Comedie Humaine is a panoramic view of 19th-century France. But Gustave Flaubert clearly defined the movement with his brilliant novel of the bourgeois Madame Bovary. Balzac and especially Flaubert influenced to a high degree the later realists and naturalists including Guy de Maupassant, Joris Karl Huysmans, and, in England, George Eliot. By 1890, many began to reject realism, thinking it too external and superficial. Modified versions, however, were employed by such authors as Thomas Hardy, who realistically presented extreme pessimism, and Henry James, who sought to understand his characters psychologically. At the turn of the 20th century, realism as a dominant movement in France gave way to symbolism and neo-romanticism. [This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Gustave Flaubert.]

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