Books by Diana Knight

Texts about paintings, painters and sculptors are obvious test cases for issues of representation. A significant corpus of artist stories is scattered through Honore de Balzac's Comedie humaine which, from Marx to Lukacs to Roland Barthes's enormously influential S/Z (1970), has been a key literary work for critical debates around French realism.

This major new study takes issue both with the traditional critical view that Flaubert's central characters are weak and with the approach adopted by a number of contemporary critics who claim that character is deliberately undermined in the interests of non-representational writing.