Flaubert's Tentation Remapping Nineteenth-Century French Histories of Religion and Science

"This is the first comprehensive study in English of Flaubert's least well-known masterpiece, the final version of his Tentation de saint Antoine (1874). By assuming no prior knowledge of the work, its versions, debates, or contexts, Mary Orr opens up new readings of the seven tableaux which comprise it, and new ways of interpreting the whole. Newcomers and specialists are therefore invited to contemplate afresh this central work in Flaubert's oeuvre and in nineteenth-century French studies." "For specialists in nineteenth-century French literature and in Flaubert studies, this book challenges received critical wisdom on a number of fronts. Flaubert's 'realism', 'anti-clericalism', and 'orientalism' are all remapped through the text's unlikely protagonist-visionary speaking to the religious and scientific controversies of nineteenth-century France."--BOOK JACKET.

Mary Orr is Professor of French and Director of Postgraduate Research in the School of Humanities at the University of Southampton. She is the author among others of Flaubert: Writing the Masculine (OUP, 2000) and Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Polity, 2003) as exemplifying her wide-ranging, interdisciplinary publications on Flaubert, gender, intertextuality and the modern French novel. Her most recent publications and current research are on the dissemination of nineteenth-century French science through intertextual and interpersonal relations.