Gustave flaubert biographer hawes

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist, most notable for being the leading exponent of literary realism in French literature.

He is known particularly for Madam Bovary (1857).

Flaubert’s influence on subsequent novels is vast. The critic, James Wood, commented that ‘there really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him.’ In his exposition of what is now known as literary realism Flaubert innovated in the areas of brilliant detail, visual effect, unsentimental composure, and the absence of the superfluous commentary that typified fictional prose before Flaubert.

There were writers before Flaubert whose fiction displayed some of those features, but not all of them, as was the case in the fiction of Flaubert. Writers like Jane Austen and Honore de Balzac were forerunners of the transformation of the novel that Flaubert was to bring about.

The twentieth century novel is a natural progression from those of Flaubert.