Madame Bovary is the French writer Gustave Flaubert's debut novel. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was a notorious perfectionist and claimed always to be searching for le mot juste ("the precise word"). Long established as one of the greatest novels ever written, the book has often been described as a "perfect" work of fiction. Henry James writes: "Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone; it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment." Giorgio de Chirico said that in his opinion "from the narrative point of view, the most perfect book is Madame Bovary by Flaubert".

A commitment to modernity is the underlying theme of this volume. Through essays that are interpretive and theoretical, the author seeks to situate the modern in contemporary cultural practice. She sets up an ideological vantage point to view modernism along its multiple tracks in India and the third world.The essays divide into three sections. The first two sections, Artists and ArtWork and Film/Narratives, raise questions of authorship, genre, and contemporary features of national culture that materialize into an aesthetic in the Indian context. The last section, Frames of Reference, formalizes the polemical options developed across the book. The essays here propose resistance to the depoliticization of narratives, and affirm an open-ended engagement with the avant-garde. They explore the possibility of art practice finding its own signifying space that is still a space for radical transformation.Geeta Kapur is an independent art critic and curator living in New Delhi. Her extensive publications on modern Indian art include the book Contemporary Indian Artists (Delhi, 1978), exhibition catalogues and monographs on artists. She is currently writing a monograph on Tyeb Mehta. Her essays on cultural criticism have been widely presented in forums of art history and cultural studies. Her curatorial work includes the show Bombay/Mumbai 1992 2001 in the multi-part exhibition titled Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis , at Tate Modern, London, in 2001. Geeta Kapur is a founder-editor of the Journal of Arts & Ideas and advisory editor to Third Text. She has held research fellowships at Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, and Clare Hall, Cambridge University. For the past three decades, [Geeta Kapur s] has been the singular dominant presence in the field to a point that her writings alone seem to have constituted the whole field of modern Indian art theory and criticism. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Biblio (Delhi), May June 2001. Geeta Kapur is a magisterial presence in the sphere of modern Indian art. [The] insistence on the primacy of bearing witness to creative practice has been the leitmotif of Kapur s work. . . . Kapur s contribution . . . is best understood by reflection on the radical change that her activity has brought about in Indian art criticism. Ranjit Hoskote, Art India (Mumbai), Vol. VI, 1, 2001. When Was Modernism is a book of essays: imaginative, interpretive, argumentative, polemical, political and, in the combined sense of all these, historical. . . . [It] provides an instance of passionate engagement that, at its best moments, verges on the poetic. Chaitanya Sambrani, ART AsiaPacific (Australia), Issue 30, 2001.

Ethnographic study of cultural politics in the contemporary Egyptian art world, examining how art-making is a crucial aspect of the transformation from socialism to neoliberalism in postcolonial countries.