World Literature

This book studies in English of Flaubert's least well‐known masterpiece, the final version of his Tentation de saint Antoine (1874). Thanks to Foucault, the work has the reputation of being an arcane and erudite ‘fantastic library’ or, thanks to genetic criticism, of being a ‘narrative’ of Flaubert's personal aesthetic (l'oeuvre de toute [s]a vie’). By presuming instead no necessary knowledge to read the text, its versions or its intertexts, this book sets out to offer new readings of the seven tableaux which comprise it, and new ways of interpreting the work as a whole. By arguing that Flaubert was imagining his own epoch through the eyes of a visionary saint in the 4th‐century AD, the dialogues between religion and science that are the dynamic of the work (and the two parts of this study) are elucidated for the first time. Moreover, by also arguing for the meticulous accuracy and imaginative representations of the science of the work, this book proposes in the ‘remapping’ analogy of its title that Flaubert's Tentation is a paradigm of 19th‐century French, and indeed European, ‘literary science’. For 19th‐century French and Flaubert specialists, as well as for curious new readers of the Tentation, this book thus challenges received critical wisdom on a number of fronts. It is through his unlikely protagonist‐visionary, Antoine, that Flaubert's ‘realism’, ‘anti‐clericalism’, and ‘orientalism’ can be given new airings. Through the religious and scientific dialogues of Flaubert's 1874 text this book argues that his ‘temptation’ was to write a vita of his times.

This book examines literary romance as a vehicle for the ideological contradictions of British imperialism in South Africa. It draws upon postcolonial theory and cultural materialism to discuss the imperialist Henry Rider Haggard's fictional accounts of mining in King Solomon's Mines, and Zulu history in Nada the Lily, examining these novels as fraught responses to the introduction of capitalist modernity. It goes on to analyse the counter-narratives of metropolitan and African resistance of feminist Olive Schreiner and black nationalist Sol Plaatje. The book shows how Schreiner's is a much more challenging example of anti-imperialist fiction than Robert Conrad's Heart of Darkness, published two years later. The discussion of Plaatje's Mhudi considers the book as a direct response to Haggard's imperialism and Schreiner's feminist theory. Locating the book through the politics and epistemology of the early ANC, the book reveals how Plaatje challenges Haggard's misogyny and fatalistic historiography. Mhudi, it argues, is a novel whose nationalist and sexual politics are considerably more complex than has been recognized. Plaatje uses his narrative form to articulate both radical and liberal alternatives to white South African rule. The book demonstrates how South Africa played an important if now overlooked role in British imperial culture, and shows the impact of capitalism itself in the making of racial, gender and national identities.