{"product_id":"the-family-idiot-gustave-flaubert-18211857-volume-5-volume-5","title":"The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert  1821-1857  Volume 5 (Volume 5)","description":"\u003cp\u003eWith this volume  the University of Chicago Press completes its translation of a work that is indispensable not only to serious readers of Flaubert but to anyone interested in the last major contribution by one of the twentieth centurys greatest thinkers.  That Sartres study of Flaubert  The Family Idiot  is a towering achievement in intellectual history has never been disputed. Yet critics have argued about the precise nature of this novel or biography or \"criticism-fiction\" which is the summation of Sartres philosophical  social  and literary thought. In the preface  Sartre writes: \"The Family Idiot is the sequel to Search for a Method. The subject: what  at this point in time  can we know about a man? It seemed to me that this question could only be answered by studying a specific case.\"  Sartre discusses Flauberts personal development  his relationship to his family  his decision to become a writer  and the psychosomatic crisis or \"conversion\" from his fathers domination to the freedom of his art. Sartre blends psychoanalysis with a sociological study of the ideology of the period  the crisis in literature  and Flauberts influence on the future of literature.  While Sartre never wrote the final volume he envisioned for this vast project  the existing volumes constitute in themselves a unified workone that John Sturrock  writing in the Observer  called \"a shatteringly fertile  digressive and ruthless interpretation of these few cardinal years in Flauberts life.\"  \"A virtuoso perfomance. . . . For all that this book does to make one reconsider his life  The Family Idiot is less a case study of Flaubert than it is a final installment of Sartres mythology. . . . The translator  Carol Cosman  has acquitted herself brilliantly.\"Frederick Brown  New York Review of Books  \"A splendid translation by Carol Cosman. . . . Sartre called The Family Idiot a true novel  and it does tell a story and eventually reach a shattering climax. The work can be described most simply as a dialectic  which shifts between two seemingly alternative interpretations of Flauberts destiny: a psychoanalytic one  centered on his family and on his childhood  and a Marxist one  whose guiding themes are the status of the artist in Flauberts period and the historical and ideological contradictions faced by his social class  the bourgeoisie.\"Fredric Jameson  New York Times Book Review  Jean-Paul Sartre (1906-1980) was offered  but declined  the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. His many works of fiction  drama  and philosophy include the monumental study of Flaubert  The Family Idiot  and The Freud Scenario  both published in translation by the University of Chicago Press.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44947503710261,"sku":"ByrdShop_0226735192","price":316.77,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780226735191_92650f52-165b-4727-884e-4b1c46c34cd2.jpg?v=1772682623","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-family-idiot-gustave-flaubert-18211857-volume-5-volume-5","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}