Flaubert: The Uses Of Uncertainty
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Few writers have shaped the contours of modern fiction as profoundly as Gustave Flaubert, and Jonathan Culler's Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty presents a rigorous and illuminating examination of the master's art, arguing that the very ambiguity and irresolution embedded in Flaubert's prose are not weaknesses but the defining engines of his literary power. Published as part of the prestigious Novelists and Their World series, this critical study chronicles how Flaubert — the architect of Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education — wielded indeterminacy as a sophisticated aesthetic strategy, forever unsettling the reader's desire for stable meaning and moral resolution. Culler, one of the foremost voices in literary theory and structuralist criticism, dissects Flaubert's narrative techniques with forensic precision, illustrating how irony, free indirect discourse, and deliberate narrative distance conspire to create a fiction that resists easy interpretation. The work situates Flaubert at the very threshold of literary modernity, demonstrating his foundational influence on writers and theorists alike. For anyone seeking to understand not just Flaubert, but the very nature of how the novel thinks, this study poses a question that lingers long after the final page: what if uncertainty itself is the most honest thing a novel can offer?
Author: Jonathan Culler
Format: Hardback
Published: 1974, Cornell University Press
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Few writers have shaped the contours of modern fiction as profoundly as Gustave Flaubert, and Jonathan Culler's Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty presents a rigorous and illuminating examination of the master's art, arguing that the very ambiguity and irresolution embedded in Flaubert's prose are not weaknesses but the defining engines of his literary power. Published as part of the prestigious Novelists and Their World series, this critical study chronicles how Flaubert — the architect of Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education — wielded indeterminacy as a sophisticated aesthetic strategy, forever unsettling the reader's desire for stable meaning and moral resolution. Culler, one of the foremost voices in literary theory and structuralist criticism, dissects Flaubert's narrative techniques with forensic precision, illustrating how irony, free indirect discourse, and deliberate narrative distance conspire to create a fiction that resists easy interpretation. The work situates Flaubert at the very threshold of literary modernity, demonstrating his foundational influence on writers and theorists alike. For anyone seeking to understand not just Flaubert, but the very nature of how the novel thinks, this study poses a question that lingers long after the final page: what if uncertainty itself is the most honest thing a novel can offer?