In Flaubert: Writing the Masculine Mary Orr offers a new approach to Flaubert's fiction and to the field of gender studies. Close readings of his six major works build towards a much wider picture, in which definitions of the masculine emerge from the complex context of nineteenth-century France and from current debates within gender studies. Various received ideas about Flaubert, his novels, patriarchy, realism, and the primacy of gender over sex are re-evaluated to show a writer aware of the logic and contradictions of male power.

Inspired by the work of their colleague David Gascoigne, a group of scholars from the UK and France examine in this book the narrative strategies of some of the most interesting and important French writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Stretching chronologically from 1905 to 2005, the volume examines a wide variety of prose genres, from pornography to Bildungsroman to magic realism, as well as poetry. Michel Tournier figures in several of the contributions, emerging as something of a touchstone for many of the thematic preoccupations that are common throughout the period: values and authority, self and other, identity, spirituality, migration and exile, sexuality, the body, violence and war, and language. The authors also examine the flourishing of intertextuality, as well as the use of traditional forms, such as mythical structures and the 'robinsonade', to undermine authoritative 'metarecits'. Probing these themes and forms, and their metamorphoses across 100 years, the essays demonstrate a striking degree of continuity, linking writers as different as Apollinaire and Houellebecq or Valery and Fleutiaux, and highlight the difficulty of dividing the period neatly into chronologically ordered categories labelled 'modern' or 'postmodern'.

This is the first comprehensive study in English of Flaubert's least well-known masterpiece, the final version of his Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874) which, thanks to Foucault, has the reputation of being an arcane and erudite "fantastic library" or, thanks to genetic criticism, is a "narrative" of Flaubert's personal aesthetic ("oeuvre de toute ma vie"). By presuming instead no prior knowledge of the text, its versions or its contexts, Mary Orr provides new readings of the seven tableaux which comprise Temptation, and new ways of interpreting the work as a whole, whether the reader is a newcomer to Flaubert or a specialist.
Arguing that Flaubert was imagining his own epoch through the eyes of a visionary saint in the fourth century AD, Orr elucidates the dialogues between religion and science that are the dynamic of the work for the first time. She also insists on the meticulous accuracy and imaginative representations of the science of the work, proposing--in the "remapping" analogy of her subtitle--that Flaubert's Temptation is a paradigm of nineteenth-century French, and indeed European, "literary science."
For nineteenth-century French and Flaubert specialists, this book then challenges received critical wisdom on a number of fronts. Through his unlikely protagonist-visionary, Flaubert's "realism," "anti-clericalism" and "orientalism" are all given new airings in the religious and scientific evidence of the 1874 Temptation, as indeed in his "temptation" to write the life of his times.

From Goethe to Gide brings together twelve essays on canonical male writers (six French and six German) commissioned from leading specialists in Britain and North America. Working with the tools of feminist criticism, the authors demonstrate how feminist readings of these writers can illuminate far more than attitudes to women. They raise fundamental aesthetic questions regarding, creativity, genre, realism and canonicity and show how feminist criticism can revitalize debate on these much-read writers. These commissioned essays from individual specialists focus on Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, Hoffmann, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Heine, Fontane, Zola, Kafka, Gide. The collection therefore foregrounds the major authors taught on British university BA courses in French and German who also shaped the dominant aesthetics, philosophy and bourgeois culture of European letters between 1770 and 1936. on these writers Unique in providing a comparative feminist reading of the aesthetics of canonical male works from the literatures of France and Germany, 1770-1936 Provides a major reassessment of some of the literary figures most studied in French and German courses around the world