Project overview
The writing of Stephen Jay Gould and Roy Porter has been trailblazing in popularising scientific discovery and making it more accessible to the general public. Yet popular writing -- such as the serial novel -- and poetry were doing the same dissemination of new ideas in the sciences in nineteenth-century France and Britain in creative-writing form, and before science fiction proper was developed. It is the 'literary science' of this period that my monograph project on Flaubert's 'La Tentation de Saint Antoine' ('The Temptation of Saint Anthony) seeks to investigate. Not only will my approach make accessible one of Flaubert's most erudite works by lifting it out of specialist debates (whether on the heretical ideas of the original Anthony of Egypt's times, or genetic studies of the three main versions of the text Flaubert wrote). By redirecting students in French Studies to see this work as a fictional remapping of the conflicting new ideas in religion and science in nineteenth-century France, my book offers an accessible way by which to understand the contexts, facettes and allusions of the works of other writers and artists of the period. Concomitantly, my monograph will serve through the prism of Flaubert to open up the religious, scientific and literary background of nineteenth-century France to those with more general interests in cultural history, history of science, Victorian Studies and comparative literature.