The Temptation of St. Antony (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Flaubert, Gustave

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140444106 ISBN 13: 9780140444100

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1983

Synopsis

Hallucinations and spectral visitations by people and gods from the past cause Saint Anthony to consider a number of metaphysical questions

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

A book that deeply influenced the young Freud and was the inspiration for many artists, The Temptation of Saint Anthony was Flaubert's lifelong work, thirty years in the making. Based on the story of the third-century saint who lived on an isolated mountaintop in the Egyptian desert, it is a fantastical rendering of one night during which Anthony is besieged by carnal temptations and philosophical doubt.
This Modern Library Paperback Classic reproduces the distinguished Lafcadio Hearn translation, which translator Richard Sieburth calls "a splendid period piece from one of America's premier translators of nineteenth-century French prose. In Lafcadio Hearn's Latinate rendering, Flaubert's experimental drama of the modern consciousness reads as weirdly as its oneiric original."

From the Back Cover:

“[The Temptation of Saint Anthony] calls up not only the great problems of knowledge, but the real riddles of life . . . and it confirms the awareness of our perplexity in the mysteriousness that reigns everywhere.”
—Sigmund Freud

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1983
• ISBN 10: 0140444106
• ISBN 13: 9780140444100
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Mrosovsky Kitty