Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour : a Narrative Drawn from Gustave Flaubert's Travel Notes & Letters

Gustave Flaubert

Penguin Group USA, 1996 - Travel - 230 pages

At once a classic of travel literature and a penetrating portrait of a sensibility on tour, Flaubert in Egypt wonderfully captures the young writer's impressions during his 1849 voyage to the "Orient." Using diaries, letters, travel notes, and the evidence of Flaubert's traveling companion Maxime Du Camp, Francis Steegmuller reconstructs this formative journey - through the bazaars and brothels of Cairo, down the length of the Nile, to the fabled Red Sea.

What people are saying

Review: Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

User Review  - Lisa - Goodreads

I found out about this book when it was mentioned in a story on NPR about how the trip generated the first photographs of Egypt. Flaubert in Egypt is fascinating, raw, and frequently raunchy account ...

Review: Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

User Review  - Moizza - Goodreads

I liked this book at the beginning - Flaubert is a masterful and entertaining writer. However, his accounts of the grotesque and the debauched got pretty repetitive. There are a few moments of ...

About the author

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821, the son of a prominent physician. A solitary child, he was attracted to literature at an early age, and after his recovery from a nervous breakdown suffered while a law student, he turned his total energies to writing. Aside from journeys to the Near East, Greece, Italy, and North Africa, and a stormy liaison with the poetess Louise Colet, his life was dedicated to the practice of his art. The form of his work was marked by intense aesthetic scrupulousness and passionate pursuit of le mot juste; its content alternately reflected scorn for French bourgeois society and a romantic taste for exotic historical subject matter. The success of Madame Bovary (1857) was ensured by government prosecution for “immorality”; Salammbô (1862) and The Sentimental Education (1869) received a cool public reception; not until the publication of Three Tales (1877) was his genius popularly acknowledged. Among fellow writers, however, his reputation was supreme. His circle of friends included Turgenev and the Goncourt brothers, while the young Guy de Maupassant underwent an arduous literary apprenticeship under his direction. Increasing personal isolation and financial insecurity troubled his last years. His final bitterness and disillusion were vividly evidenced in the savagely satiric Bouvard and Pécuchet, left unfinished at his death in 1880.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour : a Narrative Drawn from Gustave Flaubert's Travel Notes & Letters; A Penguin Book; Classics Series; Penguin Classics
• Author: Gustave Flaubert
• Editor: Francis Steegmüller
• Translated by: Francis Steegmüller
• Contributor: Francis Steegmüller
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Penguin Group USA, 1996
• ISBN: 0140435824, 9780140435825
• Length: 230 pages
• Subjects: Travel / Essays & Travelogues; Travel / Middle East / Egypt