Flaubert

The 2014 film adaptation of Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel, Gemma Bovery (dir. by Anne Fontaine), testifies to the enduring popularity of Flaubert’s best-known book, in the popular cultural imagination as well as in academic and critical fields.¹ Starring Gemma Arterton as the newlywed Gemma/Emma freshly transported to the Normandy countryside, this adaptation of an adaptation begins with editor-turned-provincial baker Joubert listening to a radio programme about characterization in the 1857 novel and claiming ‘Joubert, c’est moi’. In 2009, Orhan Pamuk reminded readers of the range of international novelists who have announced their debt to Flaubert, suggesting that Flaubert appeals for two apparently opposing reasons: because he expresses a boundless anger towards humanity, and because he simultaneously evokes immense compassion and understanding.² At the Hay Festival Cartagena in 2013, Julian Barnes and Mario Vargas Llosa, both of whom have devoted large swathes of their own writing to the work of Flaubert, revisited a twenty-year-old discussion. Vargas Llosa defended his passion for Emma Bovary and maintained that ‘all novelists are Flaubertians now, whether [they] like it or not’, since all are indebted to Flaubert’s innovations in narrative perspective and his rearrangement of the practice of realism. Barnes noted the changes taking place in what he calls ‘amateur Flaubert scholarship’ along with his own continually developing attitudes to Flaubert’s work.³

Not only have there been more critical works but also, in recent years, a number of collections of essays bringing the reader up to date with that criticism. In 2011, a special issue of the journal Dix-Neuf was devoted to Flaubert, capturing ‘shifting perspectives’ on his work since the publication of New Approaches in Flaubert Studies, published over a decade earlier.⁴ The editors of the Dix-Neuf collection referred back to the 1999 collection of criticism, itself a summation of critical developments in anglophone Flaubert studies since Wetherill’s 1982 Flaubert: la dimension du texte.⁵ Such is the position of Flaubert in French literary studies that the ‘writer’s writer’ demands these volumes published by critics’ critics, offering frequent re-evaluation of his work, and the trends associated with the examination of his work, for new generations of readers.⁶ In 1999, Williams and Orr highlighted gender and genetic studies as two strands at the forefront of Flaubert studies in Britain at the turn of the millennium, leaving behind the psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches that had dominated preceding decades.⁷ In 2011, Green, Orr, and Unwin emphasized the ongoing diversity of criticism, redefining, extending, and revisiting ‘older’ research topics such as Flaubert’s use of sources. They claimed that ‘the recognizably distinctive contribution to Flaubert research outside France […] is [the] carefully argued use of more than one key critical approach’.⁸ The essays in Dix-Neuf tap into significant trends in discussions of Flaubert: a continued and meticulous investigation of his manuscripts and avant-textes, comparative research into Flaubert’s relationship with writers both pre- and post-nineteenth century, a focus on siting Flaubert’s work alongside an ever-expanding corpus of sociohistorical documents that give insight into, for instance, scientific, geological, and pharmaceutical dimensions across his œuvre. The following discussion tracks such recent developments in Flaubert studies, focusing in particular on post-millennial publications, in the wake of the 1999 update offered by Orr and Williams. A summary of recent French scholarship on Flaubert will be followed by a more detailed evaluation of the range of approaches to his work since 2000: biographical, comparative, genetic, adaptive, and thematic. Although, as will be seen, there is much crossover between French and anglophone critical backgrounds, work in France sees a particular reliance on the genetic study of Flaubert’s texts.

Many accounts of critical work on Flaubert in a French context are already available. The relaunch of the Série Flaubert in 2005 after a ten-year hiatus saw Gisèle Séginger summarize developments in Flaubert studies in France; her volume also includes essays by Mary Orr and Kayoko Kashiwagi, on recent anglophone and Japanese approaches respectively.⁹ Séginger draws attention to the two centres of research in France...