Madame Bovary (Norton Critical Editions) [Paperback]

Gustave Flaubert (Author), Margaret Cohen (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0393979172 | ISBN-13: 978-0393979176 | Publication Date: December 14, 2004 | Edition: 2nd

The text of this Norton Critical Edition is based on Eleanor Marx Aveling’s celebrated translation, revised by Paul de Man.

Margaret Cohen’s careful editorial revision modernizes and renews Flaubert’s stylistic masterpiece. In addition, Cohen has added to the Second Edition a new introduction, substantially new annotations, and twenty-one striking images, including photographs and engravings, that inform students’ understanding of middle-class life in nineteenth-century provincial France. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert created a cogent counter discourse that exposed and resisted the dominant intellectual and social ideologies of his age. The novel’s subversion of conventional moral norms inevitably created controversy and eventually led to Flaubert’s prosecution by the French government on charges of offending "public and religious morality." This Norton edition is the only one available that includes the complete manuscript from Flaubert’s 1857 trial. "Criticism" includes sixteen studies regarding the novel’s central themes, twelve of them new to the Second Edition, including essays by Charles Baudelaire, Henry James, Roland Barthes, Jonathan Culler, and Naomi Schor. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) is considered to be one of the most important French novelists of the nineteenth century. He's most well known for his novel Madame Bovary, and for his desire to write "a book about nothing," a novel in which all external elements, especially the presence of the author, have been eliminated, leaving nothing but style itself. Often considered a member of the naturalist school, Flaubert despised categorizations of this sort, and in novels like Bouvard and Pécuchet demonstrates the inaptness of this label. In addition to these two novels, he is also the author of A Sentimental Education, Salambo, Three Tales, and The Temptation of Saint Anthony.

Margaret Cohen is Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford University. Her publications include The Sentimental Education of the Novel and Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, as well as the co-edited collections Spectacles of Realism—Body, Gender, Genre and The Literary Channel: The Inter-national Inventions of the Novel. She has also translated and edited Sophie Cottin’s Claire d’Albe (1799).

Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 2nd edition (December 14, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393979172
• ISBN-13: 978-0393979176
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,602 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #35 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > French

More About the Author

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), the younger son of a provincial doctor, briefly studied law before devoting himself to writing, with limited success during his lifetime. After the publication of Madame Bovary in 1857, he was prosecuted for offending public morals.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptional realist novel, November 23, 2008

By 

Alice L. Martin - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Madame Bovary (Norton Critical Editions) (Paperback)

What could anyone ask for when reading a work for a class in Realism than a novel that not only inspires one to keep reading, but also contains a transcript of a trial the author goes through on a charge he was lewd and lacivious in the writing of the story?

Flaubert keeps the reader entertained with his descriptive rendering of a woman who cannot accept her life with her boring husband and takes lovers to keep her passionate flame lit. The sad part of the tale is the husband never knows and loves her unconditionally, and even at the end find reasons to hold her in the highest esteem and diefy her name.