"This is the first comprehensive study in English of Flaubert's least well-known masterpiece, the final version of his Tentation de saint Antoine (1874). By assuming no prior knowledge of the work, its versions, debates, or contexts, Mary Orr opens up new readings of the seven tableaux which comprise it, and new ways of interpreting the whole. Newcomers and specialists are therefore invited to contemplate afresh this central work in Flaubert's oeuvre and in nineteenth-century French studies." "For specialists in nineteenth-century French literature and in Flaubert studies, this book challenges received critical wisdom on a number of fronts. Flaubert's 'realism', 'anti-clericalism', and 'orientalism' are all remapped through the text's unlikely protagonist-visionary speaking to the religious and scientific controversies of nineteenth-century France."--BOOK JACKET.

This book reveals the extensive and dynamic interplay between Les Tentations de saint Antoine and the rest of Flaubert’s fiction. Mary Neiland combines two critical approaches, genetic and intertextual criticism, in order to trace the development of selected topoi and figures across the three versions of La Tentation and on through Flaubert’s other major works. Each chapter is devoted to one of these centres of interest, namely, the banquet scene, the cityscape, the crowd, the seductive female and the Devil. Detailed study of these five areas exposes a remarkable intimacy between writings that appear at a far remove from each other. The networks of recurring images located demonstrate for the first time the obsessive nature of Flaubert’s writing practice; the pursuit of these networks across his fictional writings exposes his developing technique; and La Tentation is revealed as both a privileged moment of expression and as a place of auto-reflection. This volume will be of interest to students and specialists of Flaubert as well as to those interested in genetic and intertextual criticism.

Gott examines Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) in conjunction with Gustave Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874). He provides a highly original reading of both texts and argues that a stylistic affinity exists between the two works.

Gustave Flaubert is probably the most famous novelist of nineteenth-century France, and his best known work, Madame Bovary, is read in numerous comparative literature and French courses. His fiction set the standard to which other authors turned to learn their craft, and his cult of art and his unrelenting search for stylistic perfection inspired many later writers, such as Maupassant, Proust, Conrad, Faulkner, and Joyce. His denunciation of materialistic, corrupt society; his fascination with altered states of consciousness; his oscillation between metaphysical longings and a radical nihilism; and his deep-seated mistrust of the adequacy of words themselves anticipate the works of contemporary authors. This reference is a convenient guide to his life and writings. Included in this volume are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries on Flaubert's individual works and major characters; historical persons and events that shaped his life; the themes that run throughout his writings; the critical approaches employed by scholars studying his works; and related topics of interest. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and most close with a brief bibliography. All of his major works are treated at length, and the volume mentions nearly every unpublished project of his that has a title. The book concludes with a selected, general bibliography of major studies.

Romanticism and after in France is a series designed to publish research monographs or longer works of high quality whether by established scholars or recent graduates, dealing with French literature in the period from pre-Romanticism to the turn of the twentieth century.

To what extent can semiotics illuminate key problems in religious studies, given the centrality of symbols, language, and other modes of signification in religion and theology? The volume explores semiotic methodologies for the study of religion, with an emphasis on their critical and creative reconfigurations. The contributors come from different specialties, such as cognitive science, ethnography, linguistics, communication studies, art studies, religious studies, philosophy of religion, and theology. Part One consists of chapters focusing on theoretical perspectives. Part two focuses on applications in texts and case studies while still considering methodological issues. Many specific traditions and perspectives are taken up, such as C. S. Peirce, A. J. Greimas and the Paris School, Juri Lotman’s semiotics of culture, Bruno Latour and material semiotics, linguistic anthropology, social semiotics, cognitive semiotics, embodied and enactive perspectives on language and mind, semiotics of the image and iconicity, multimodality, intertextuality, and semiotics of colors. The book provides readers with a succinct overview of how contemporary semiotics can be useful in understanding a broad array of topics in the study of religion.

Bristling with demons, grotesques, and bizarre apparitions, the graphic work of Odilon Redon has often seemed to be the product of a mind unhinged. In The Temptation of Saint Redon, Stephen F. Eisenman argues instead that these works are Redon's conscious and considered response to changing social realities—an attempt to find refuge from the forces of modernization in an imaginative world of the macabre and the fantastic. Eisenman's careful attention to the circumstances of Redon's life (1840-1916) allows him to bring into focus the interconnections between Redon's complex style and the culture and society of his time. Born and raised on a sixteenth-century estate near Bordeaux, Redon was immersed as a child in traditional rural culture. "I spent my entire childhood in the Médoc completely free, among peasant children," he recalled in his memoirs. "I heard them tell supernatural tales—witches still exist there." Indeed, local tales and legends of witches, ghosts, one-eyed monsters, evil eyes, and wood fairies figure prominently in Redon's graphic works, which he called his noirs, or "blacks." After formal training at Bordeaux and Paris in the 1850s and 1860s, Redon began to chart his independent artistic course. Eisenman shows how, rejecting both naturalism and classicism, Redon, a prototypical Symbolist, found in grotesque and epic genres the expression of organic communities and precapitalist societies. He places Redon's desire for this imagined world of superstitious simplicity a desire manifest in his entire mature artistic practice in the context of contemporary avant-garde movements. Redon's great noirs of the 1870s and 1880s, dreamlike configurations of seemingly irreconcilable elements from portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, show an increasingly subtle control of connotation and a complex indebtedness to caricature, allegory, and puns. Many of the noirs also visually interpret works by like-minded authors, including Baudelaire, Flaubert, Poe, and Mallarmé, one of Redon's close friends. Eisenman's analysis of the noirs underscores Redon's interest in creating an imaginative, even fantastic art, that could act directly on the human spirit. In addition to deepening our understanding of Redon and his art, The Temptation of Saint Redon exposes a link between place, politics, personal history, and the artistic imagination.