La percezione dello spazio nell' Éducation sentimentale

Abstract

This study intends to show some features in Flaubert's novel anticipating twentieth century narrative literature developments, in regard to space representations. Balzac's realistic novel, characterized by a perceptive attention, individuated every thing and its elements in their specific function, instrumentally related to the "horizon" where they were fit, and it weaved significant nets linking objects, places, people, social and historical events. In the work of Flaubert, on the contrary, a paradox takes place, involving objectivity and attention to inner dimension of characters, which upset the rules of realistic writing. That appears through the "reading" of some significative pages of the novel where realistic space mingles in imagined space.