Flaubert: Writing the Masculine

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.