Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences
of the Russian Academy of Sciences
LITERATUROVEDCHESKII
ZHURNAL
The Journal of Literary History and Theory
Peer-reviewed Academic Journal

G. FLAUBERT’S NOVEL "MADAME BOVARY": HORIZONS OF AESTHETIC TRANSFORMATIONS

Litvinenko N.A.

Abstract

The article examines the peculiarities of the poetics of Flaubert’s novel "Madame Bovary" which occupies a central place in French novelism of the 1850s and is associated with the literary trends of the time in many ways. The article discusses the transformation of Balzac’s canon of realism, the differences in the artistic principles of depicting contemporary reality between Flaubert and such representatives of the school of realism as Chanfleury and Duranty; the proximity of certain elements of poetics of the novel and the portrayal of heroes to naturalism (the role of social motives, temperament and environment); the typological similarity of Flaubert with the principles of aestheticism of the Parnassian school. The main attention is paid to the peculiarities of Flaubert’s realism, to the role of romantic motives and allusions, their ironic interpretation in the novel. Romantic traditions, even in their mass psychological refraction, retain their value semantics, contribute to the formation of a halo around Emma, typical to the eternal images of world literature. The semantics of Bovarism is opposed to the vulgarity of the commonness, at the same time almost coinciding with it. As a result, bovarism appears as a sociocultural analogue of such significant and large-scale phenomena of the 19th century culture as Byronism and Georgesandism. Transforming, rethinking the existing and emerging strategies of artistic writing, Flaubert in his novel creates an innovative, unique aesthetic synthesis, including the interaction of various literary trends, aesthetic impulses and ideas. The new non-romantic dual world arises on the basis of the contrast between the vulgarity of life and the artistic perfection of its embodiment, in that approaching the antitheses and antinomies of Baudelaire’s "Flowers of Evil".

Keywords

realism; novel; romanticism; poetics; bovarism; deromantization; innovation; non-romantic dual world.

DOI: 10.31249/litzhur/2021.53.02

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