The Cult of Form in the Literature of Flaubert

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to reflect upon Flaubert’s answer to the nineteenth-century problem of justifying the existence of literature. As means of introduction, this answer is presented in terms of a religion of beauty, of form and of style. This essay shows the different stages through which the inherent tension of the Flaubertian formula evolves: from the relationship between faith and skepticism, through the ways in which set the ground for the departure of modern writing as a poetics of style understood as transcendent value (Barthes), to the way in which he foreshadows the crisis of his own program through the radicalization of the paradox of the novel (Lukács) in the evolution of the realist axis.