Editing Madame Bovary (section)

==Literary significance and reception==
Long established as one of the greatest novels, the book has been described as a "perfect" work of fiction.<ref>{{Cite web |date=2023-10-04 |title=Madame Bovary|url=https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/flaubert/mbovary.htm |access-date=2023-10-04 |website=Complete Review}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways|url=http://www.theomnivore.co.uk/Book/Classification/Fiction/Genre/Classic_Fiction/6533-Madame_Bovary_Provincial_Ways/Default.aspx|access-date=12 July 2024|website=The Omnivore|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121006032948/http://www.theomnivore.co.uk:80/Book/Classification/Fiction/Genre/Classic_Fiction/6533-Madame_Bovary_Provincial_Ways/Default.aspx|archive-date=6 Oct 2012}}</ref> [[Henry James]] wrote: "''Madame Bovary'' has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone: it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment."<ref>{{cite book |last=James |first=Henry |author-link=Henry James |title=Notes on Novelists |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons |location=New York |year=1914 |pages=80}}</ref> [[Marcel Proust]] praised the "grammatical purity" of Flaubert's style, while [[Vladimir Nabokov]] said that "stylistically it is prose doing what poetry is supposed to do".<ref>Quoted by Malcolm Bowie, ''Introduction to Madame Bovary'', translated by Margaret Mauldon, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. vii.</ref> Similarly, in his preface to his novel ''[[The Joke (novel)|The Joke]]'', [[Milan Kundera]] wrote, "not until the work of Flaubert did prose lose the stigma of aesthetic inferiority. Ever since ''Madame Bovary'', the art of the novel has been considered equal to the art of poetry."<ref>{{cite book |last=Kundera |first=Milan |author-link=Milan Kundera |title=The Joke}}</ref> [[Giorgio de Chirico]] said that in his opinion "from the narrative point of view, the most perfect book is ''Madame Bovary'' by Flaubert".<ref>{{cite book |last=Siniscalco |first=Carmine |title=Incontro con Giorgio de Chirico |publisher=Edizioni La Bautta |location=Matera–Ferrara |year=1985 |pages=131–132}} See excerpt on [http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/de-chirico-e-la-letteratura/ Fondazionedechirico.org]</ref> [[Julian Barnes]] called it the best novel that has ever been written.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Barnes |first=Julian |author-link=Julian Barnes |title=Writer's Writer and Writer's Writer's Writer |url=https://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n22/julian-barnes/writers-writer-and-writers-writers-writer |journal=London Review of Books |volume=32 |issue=22 |pages=7–11 |date=18 November 2010}}</ref>

The novel exemplifies the tendency of realism, over the course of the nineteenth century, to become increasingly psychological, concerned with the accurate representation of thoughts and emotions rather than of external things.<ref>{{cite web |title=Modernism Lab – Collaborative Research on Literary Modernism |url=https://modernism.coursepress.yale.edu/madame-bovary/}}</ref> Thus it prefigures the work of modernist novelists Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

The book was controversial upon its release: its scandalous subject matter led to an [[obscenity]] trial in 1857. Flaubert was acquitted.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Blakemore |first1=Erin |title=What Madame Bovary Revealed About the Freedom of the Press |journal=JSTOR Daily |date=16 December 2016 |url=https://daily.jstor.org/what-madame-bovary-revealed-about-the-freedom-of-the-press/ |access-date=12 August 2022}}</ref> ''[[Le Figaro]]'' was negative of the work.<ref name="newspapers.com">{{Cite web |title=Article clipped from The Ottawa Citizen News|url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-ottawa-citizen/139345460/|access-date=22 January 2024 |website=[[Newspapers]]}}</ref> They stated, "Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer."<ref name="newspapers.com"/>