Bouvard et Pécuchet is an unfinished satirical work by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1881 after his death in 1880. Although conceived in 1863 as Les Deux Cloportes ("The Two Woodlice"), and partially inspired by a short story of Barthélemy Maurice (Les Deux Greffiers, "The Two Court Clerks", which appeared in La Revue des Tribunaux in 1841 and which he may have read in 1858), Flaubert did not begin the work in earnest until 1872, at a time when financial ruin threatened. Over time, the book obsessed him to the degree that he claimed to have read over 1500 books in preparation for writing it—he intended it to be his masterpiece, surpassing all of his other works.
For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succès de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and arousing novel.
This volume strives to cover those works most often found in high-school and undergraduate literature courses. Entries fall into one of four categories: biographical articles on novelists; plot synopses for selected novels; literary terms and genres (e.g., Feminism, Surrealism); and historical events (e.g., French Revolution) that influenced novelists writing in French. The first two categories account for the overwhelming majority of entries. Although well-known authors such as Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust are here, so, too, are contemporary novelists such as Raphael Confiant, Assia Djebar, and Antonine Maillet, hailing from Martinique, Algeria, and Canada, respectively.
