Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks - Softcover

Gay, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393325091 ISBN 13: 9780393325096

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003

Synopsis

A revelatory work that examines the intricate relationship between history and literature, truth and fiction―with some surprising conclusions.

Focusing on three literary masterpieces―Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901)―Peter Gay, a leading cultural historian, demonstrates that there is more than one way to read a novel.

Typically, readers believe that fiction, especially the Realist novels that dominated Western culture for most of the nineteenth century and beyond, is based on historical truth and that great novels possess a documentary value. That trust, Gay brilliantly shows, is misplaced; novels take their own path to reality. Using Dickens, Flaubert, and Mann as his examples, Gay explores their world, their craftsmanship, and their minds. In the process, he discovers that all three share one overriding quality: a resentment and rage against the society that sustains the novel itself. Using their stylish writing as a form of revenge, they deal out savage reprisals, which have become part of our Western literary canon. A New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of 2002.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Gay (1923―2015) was the author of more than twenty-five books, including the National Book Award winner The Enlightenment, the best-selling Weimar Culture, and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time.

From Library Journal:

In this little book, historian and cultural critic Gay (Schnitzler's Century) turns his gaze to the realist novels of Dickens, Flaubert, and Thomas Mann. Very often, he argues, readers interpret realist novels as mirrors that can be held up to their societies to offer an accurate portrayal of the historical details of that social world. On this reading, Dickens's portraits of orphanages in industrial London or Flaubert's depictions of the vagaries of the new bourgeoisie in 19th-century France become faithful descriptions of the society at hand. Not so, Gay contends. In close readings of Bleak House, Madame Bovary, and Buddenbrooks, Gay demonstrates that realist novels cannot be taken as accurate guides to the historical details of their times. Quite simply, he says, the powerful insights of the novels arise from a combination of the authors' psychological insights and their historical contexts. For example, Dickens's portrait of the bureaucratic boondoggles of the Chancery Court, Gay contends, does not accurately depict the court of 1853, as earlier reform bills had introduced significant changes in how it conducted itself. Despite the historical inaccuracies these novels pass along, their significance lies in the subversive "reprisals" they make to their societies. Unfortunately, Gay is no literary critic; his readings are not particularly lively, and his insights are neither new nor startling. His readings often tend toward reductionism (Buddenbrooks as a novel about Mann's homosexual tendencies), and his argument that these novels offer subversive readings of their societies is simplistic, providing no incisive wisdom about the texts. More thoughtful essays on Bleak House and Madame Bovary, for example, can be found in Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature. Not recommended.
- Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0393325091
• ISBN 13: 9780393325096
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 194