The Dictionary of Received Ideas (Syren) - Softcover

Flaubert, Gustave

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140389040 ISBN 13: 9780140389043

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1995

Synopsis

This is a miniature encyclopedia of 19th-century bourgeois values, a dictionary that takes a humorous look at life in that century.

About this title

About the Author

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821, the son of a prominent physician. A solitary child, he was attracted to literature at an early age, and after his recovery from a nervous breakdown suffered while a law student, he turned his total energies to writing. Aside from journeys to the Near East, Greece, Italy, and North Africa, and a stormy liaison with the poetess Louise Colet, his life was dedicated to the practice of his art. The form of his work was marked by intense aesthetic scrupulousness and passionate pursuit of le mot juste; its content alternately reflected scorn for French bourgeois society and a romantic taste for exotic historical subject matter. The success of Madame Bovary (1857) was ensured by government prosecution for immorality; Salammb (1862) and The Sentimental Education (1869) received a cool public reception; not until the publication of Three Tales (1877) was his genius popularly acknowledged. Among fellow writers, however, his reputation was supreme. His circle of friends included Turgenev and the Goncourt brothers, while the young Guy de Maupassant underwent an arduous literary apprenticeship under his direction. Increasing personal isolation and financial insecurity troubled his last years. His final bitterness and disillusion were vividly evidenced in the savagely satiric Bouvard and Pcuchet, left unfinished at his death in 1880.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0140389040
• ISBN 13: 9780140389043
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 80