Abstract

Flaubert and Sons is a study of the narrative processes at work in novels of three French authors: Flaubert, Zola, and Proust. The work focuses on the theories of representation posited by the authors and on the crises of representation in their novels. Studies of Madame Bovary and Bouvard et Pécuchet show the strategies that Flaubert uses to establish verisimilitude. As one of Flaubert's heirs, Zola creates a textual machine in Les Rougon-Macquart, a paradigm seen in embryonic form in Thérèse Raquin; this mechanization of the text is a means of dealing with the problematics of verisimilar representation. As Flaubert's other «son, » Proust develops theories of the textual subject throughout the Recherche as his means of dealing with and overcoming the legacies of realism. Flaubert and Sons follows a line of development of the French novel from realism through the beginning of the twentieth century.