Madame Bovary : Provincial Manners : Complete, Unabridged, and Uncensored

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CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Jan 7, 2009 - Fiction - 206 pages
Madame Bovary is a novel by Gustave Flaubert, often considered his masterpiece. The novel focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns.

It now stands virtually unchallenged not only as a seminal work of Realism, but as one of the most influential novels ever written.

The work was attacked for obscenity by public prosecutors when it was first published in 1856, but the author was aquitted in 1857.

A 2007 poll of contemporary authors cited Madame Bovary as one of the two greatest novels ever written.

About the author (2009)

Born in the town of Rouen, in northern France, in 1821, Gustave Flaubert was sent to study law in Paris at the age of 18. After only three years, his career was interrupted and he retired to live with his widowed mother in their family home at Croisset, on the banks of the Seine River. Supported by a private income, he devoted himself to his writing. Flaubert traveled with writer Maxime du Camp from November 1849 to April 1851 to North Africa, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. When he returned he began Madame Bovary, which appeared first in the Revue in 1856 and in book form the next year. The realistic depiction of adultery was condemned as immoral and Flaubert was prosecuted, but escaped conviction. Other major works include Salammbo (1862), Sentimental Education (1869), and The Temptation of Saint Antony (1874). His long novel Bouvard et Pecuchet was unfinished at his death in 1880. After his death, Flaubert's fame and reputation grew steadily, strengthened by the publication of his unfinished novel in 1881 and the many volumes of his correspondence.

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