Monography profile

The aim of this book has been to explore the complicated Slovak reception of three important French writers of the second half of the 19th century – Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), Émile Zola (1840–1902) and Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) – who significantly influenced the development of European prose fiction. In the case of Flaubert, it was his new narrative aesthetic in Madame Bovary (1857) and Sentimental Education (1867) that left a mark on the development of the 20th-century novel; in the case of Zola, it was his understanding of the novel as a scientific experiment and his new doctrine of naturalism that perceived the individual through biology; and in the case of Maupassant, it was his new form of the novella that predicted the development of short prose fiction and the interior psychological perspective of narration. These three authors, alongside their English, American, Russian and Scandinavian counterparts, shaped the development of world literature; in Slovakia, in addition, there was a strong influence from Polish, Hungarian, Czech and other authors. However, the cultural, literary and ideological influence of France in the second half of the 19th century was globally so powerful that it was rivalled only by that of Russian novelists. East/West was therefore the axis on which the process of accepting foreign models and defining one’s own orientation took place in Slovak literature and criticism in the late 19th and early 20th century.