Name: Bouvard and Pecuchet By Gustave Flaubert
SKU: 9780140443202
Price: 8.40 GBP
Availability: InStock

Bouvard and Pecuchet Summary

Bouvard and Pecuchet: With the Dictionary of Received Ideas by Gustave Flaubert

Bouvard and Pecuchet are two Chaplinesque copy-clerks who meet on a park bench in Paris. Following an unexpected inheritance, they decide to give up their jobs and explore the world of ideas.

In this, his last novel, unfinished on his death in 1880, Flaubert attempted to encompass his lifelong preoccupation with bourgeois stupidity and his disgust at the banalities of intellectual life in France. Into it he poured all his love of detail, his delight in the life of the mind, his despair of human nature, and his pleasure in passionate friendship. The result is a kind of encyclopedia made into farce, wholly grotesque and wholly original, in the spirit of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote or Ulysses.

About Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821, the son of a prominent physician. A solitary child, he was attracted to literature at an early age, and after his recovery from a nervous breakdown suffered while a law student, he turned his total energies to writing. Aside from journeys to the Near East, Greece, Italy, and North Africa, and a stormy liaison with the poetess Louise Colet, his life was dedicated to the practice of his art. The form of his work was marked by intense aesthetic scrupulousness and passionate pursuit of le mot juste; its content alternately reflected scorn for French bourgeois society and a romantic taste for exotic historical subject matter. The success of Madame Bovary (1857) was ensured by government prosecution for immorality; Salammbo (1862) and The Sentimental Education (1869) received a cool public reception; not until the publication of Three Tales (1877) was his genius popularly acknowledged. Among fellow writers, however, his reputation was supreme. His circle of friends included Turgenev and the Goncourt brothers, while the young Guy de Maupassant underwent an arduous literary apprenticeship under his direction. Increasing personal isolation and financial insecurity troubled his last years. His final bitterness and disillusion were vividly evidenced in the savagely satiric Bouvard and Pecuchet, left unfinished at his death in 1880.

Dr. A.J. Krailsheimer was born in 1921 and was Tutor in French at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1957 until his retirement in 1988. His publications are Studies in Self-Interest (1963), Rabelais and the Franciscans (1965), Three Conteurs of the Sixteenth Century (1966), Rabelais (1967), A. J. de Rance, Abbot of La Trappe (1974), Pascal (1980), Conversion (1980), Letters of A. J. de Rance (1984), Rance and the Trappist Legacy (1985) and Correspondance de Rance (1993). He has also translated Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet and Salammbo and Pascal's The Provincial Letters for the Penguin Classics.

Additional information

Sku

GOR001635554

ISBN 13

9780140443202

ISBN 10

0140443207

Title

Bouvard and Pecuchet: With the Dictionary of Received Ideas by Gustave Flaubert

Author

Gustave Flaubert

Condition

Used - Very Good

Binding type

Paperback

Publisher

Penguin Books Ltd

Year published

19760624

Number of pages

336

Prizes

N/A

Cover note

Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.

Note

This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Bouvard and Pecuchet Gustave Flaubert

Bouvard and Pecuchet by Gustave Flaubert

Bouvard and Pecuchet Summary

Bouvard and Pecuchet: With the Dictionary of Received Ideas by Gustave Flaubert

About Gustave Flaubert

Additional information

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