From Publishers Weekly

Gustave Flaubert's boyhood desire to become an actor was "his way of living the situation assigned to him in the Flaubert family," writes Sartre. This monumental life study draws on psychoanalysis and existentialism in imagining how Flaubert forged his inner self. Sartre portrays the author of Madame Bovary as a Nero of words whose towering literary ambition was the revenge of a child seething with rage at his manly, overpossessive mother. Though this volume covers Flaubert's early literary career, the emphasis is on childhood and adolescence. His fetishes, homoerotic affairs, self-proclaimed desire to be a woman and masochism add up to a seldom-seen side of the polished literary stylist. Readers not put off by the dense academic prose and highly speculative approach will find much to ponder.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate

edition.

From Library Journal

In this second in a proposed five-volume translation of Sartre's biographical magnum opus, Sartre traces the psychosocial development of Flaubert from childhood through young adulthood. The philosopher's excursuses on such topics as comedy as a social agency and aesthetic theory realized through the life of Flaubert are relevant and provocative inclusions in a text already made engrossing by the facts of the novelist's development (from "imaginary child" to actor to writer) and Sartre's psychoanalytical insights. As she did in Volume 1, Cosman has rendered the text both faithfully and readably. A necessary addition to philosophy and literature collections, along with Volume 1 and Hazel Barnes's commentary, Sartre and Flaubert (both LJ 9/1/81).Francisca Goldsmith, Golden Gate Univ. Lib., San Francisco
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate

edition.