Dictionary Of Accepted Ideas

Gustave Flaubert

Dictionary Of Accepted Ideas

Literature by Gustave Flaubert

Translated from French by Jacques Barzun

With a contribution by Gustave Flaubert

Throughout his life Flaubert made it a game to eavesdrop for the cliché, the platitude, the borrowed and unquestioned idea with which the “right thinking” swaddle their minds. After his death his little treasury of absurdities, of half-truths and social lies, was published as a Dictionnaire des idées reçues. Because its devastating humor and irony are often dependent on the phrasing in vernacular French, the Dictionnaire was long considered untranslatable. This notion was taken as a challenge by Jacques Barzun. Determined to find the exact English equivalent for each “accepted idea” Flaubert recorded, he has succeeded in documenting our own inanities. With a satirist’s wit and a scholar’s precision, Barzun has produced a very contemporary self-portrait of the middle-class philistine, a species as much alive today as when Flaubert railed against him.

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Paperback(published Mar, 01 1954)

ISBN
9780811200547
Price US
12.95
Portrait of Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert

19th century French novelist