Flaubert's Temptation

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). By presuming no prior knowledge, only the intellectual curiosity of its readers, this monograph offers new readings of the seven tableaux which comprise Temptation, and new ways of interpreting the work as a whole. By arguing that Flaubert was imagining his own epoch through the eyes of a visionary saint in the fourth-century AD, the dialogues between religion and science that are the dynamic of the work are elucidated for the first time. By also arguing for the meticulous accuracy of the science of the work, this book proposes in the 'remapping' analogy of its title that Flaubert's Tentation is a paradigm of nineteenth-century French, and indeed European, 'literary science'.