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Nineteenth Century French Studies 32.1&2 (2003-2004) 180-181



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Porter, Laurence M., ed. A Gustave Flaubert Encyclopedia. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001. Pp. 380. ISBN 0-313-30744-x

Laurence Porter and a hard-working team of Flaubert scholars have accomplished the daunting task of assembling an encyclopedia devoted to Flaubert's life and literary works. The book will be a valuable resource for Flaubert specialists as well as for students and nonspecialists. Entries treat not only Flaubert's major works but also his unpublished projects and juvenilia. Historical and biographical information features prominently, and includes places (e.g., Rouen, Croisset, Paris, Trouville), events (e.g., the Franco-Prussian War), nineteenth-century critics (e.g., Sainte-Beuve), family and acquaintances, cultural and aesthetic tendencies (e.g., roman-ticism, classicism, orientalism, postmodernism), as well as relevant physiological and psychological phenomena such as disease, neurosis, sadism, androgyny, fetishism, and the Ĺ“dipus complex. One also finds entries for writers and philosophers who influenced Flaubert or were influenced by him (e.g., Nabokov, Faulkner, and Tolstoy; Sartre, Spinoza, and Hegel). A number of essays deal deftly with such hallmarks of Flaubert's style as irony, free indirect style, indeterminacy, and focalization.

Among the greatest strengths of this encyclopedia as a tool of both pedagogy and research are its entirely up-to-date overview of critical approaches to Flaubert (genetic criticism and queer, feminist, and gender studies, for example) and the detailed guidance it provides for the investigation of manuscripts, editions, un-published texts, film adaptations, and electronic resources. The commentaries on cd-rom and Web resources tell us not only where to look but also how to tap into this rich vein of visual and auditory materials. Teachers will have recourse to this encyclopedia when, for example, deciding which film version of Madame Bovary to show students, or advising graduate students who may wish to do archival research in France.

One gleans from this volume an accurate sense of the main issues and sources informing contemporary Flaubert criticism. Bibliographical notations appear at the end of each entry as well as in the Selected Bibliography, which is helpfully divided by [End Page 180] subject matter: print and audiovisual background materials, bibliographies, bio-graphies, correspondence, critical studies, French editions, English translations, and stylistic studies. An index as well as in-text cross references allow readers to consult rapidly a variety of entries and to acquire thereby an understanding that is simultaneously particular and synthetic.

Laurence Porter and his contributors are to be congratulated for having assembled a useful, comprehensive, and suggestive compendium of sources and ideas pertaining to the most famous novelist of nineteenth-century France. Whether one's interests lie in Flaubert's early theater or his carnets de travail, the Madame Bovary trial or the author's epilepsy, the Voyage en Orient or Woody Allen's notorious "The Kugelmass Episode," A Gustave Flaubert Encyclopedia is the place to begin.



Vaheed Ramazani
Tulane University

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