<i>Projet originel, projet créateur: reading Flaubert's authorship in its contexts after Sartre and Bourdieu</i>

Moreover, the critical engagement with each novel will demonstrate the fecundity in employing Sartrean and Bourdieusian theory as a framework for literary analysis. In doing so, this thesis will identify and fill a significant gap on critical discussions of Sartre’s and Bourdieu’s readings of Flaubert, wherein the presence of the author and his literary output has become largely absent. By positioning itself at the nexus of philosophical and sociological approaches to literature and history, this thesis shall thus endeavour to turn the critical focus of Sartre’s and Bourdieu’s Flaubert texts back onto the novelist and his works.

Whilst the disparate approaches of biography and sociological field analysis suggest a critical tension between Sartre and Bourdieu on Flaubert, the analysis carried out in each chapter will identify key points of reconciliation between the two by employing a dual Sartre-Bourdieusian perspective to seek correspondences between the personal, socio-historical, and cultural contexts of Flaubert’s novels and their style, structuring and characterisation.

This in turn will provide renewed insight into the evolution of Flaubert’s literary aesthetic, with the cross-reading of Sartre and Bourdieu allowing for a theoretical interrogation of the dispositions, attitudes, and behaviours of Flaubert’s protagonists within the historically and socially determinate positions they occupy in the context of France’s nineteenth century.