Flaubert's Characters
The Language of Illusion

Dr Knight explores the relationship between the contents of Flaubert's stories and his practice as a writer.

Diana Knight (Author)

9780521110587, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 7 May 2009

136 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.1 cm, 0.36 kg

This major new study takes issue both with the traditional critical view that Flaubert's central characters are weak and with the approach adopted by a number of contemporary critics who claim that character is deliberately undermined in the interests of non-representational writing. Rather, Dr Knight explores the relationship between the contents of Flaubert's stories and his practice as a writer, thereby reinstating the functional value of character in his work. She shows that essential aspects of Flaubert's aesthetic - the opaqueness of language, stupidity, fascination and reverie as the object of art - depend on the psychological make-up of fictional characters: their pathological relationship to language and reality mirrors Flaubert's conception of the readers' stupefied response to his own stylistic effects and to his wilfully naive stories. Flaubert emerges as a representational writer, but one who is supremely self-conscious of the fictional status of his representations.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Character and value
1. Oriental aesthetics
2. The merits of inarticulacy
3. By-passing speech
4. Endless illusions
5. Overturning reality
Conclusion: Making madness more mad
Notes
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]