Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert Laura Spagnoli Timothy Unwin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 234 pp. This rich, well-organized collection of essays examines a range of topics and offers a variety of perspectives through which to approach Flaubert's work. Timothy Unwin wisely places essays concerning biography and literary influences at the beginning and briefly introduces all that follows while considering the author's life in chapter 1. Evoking Flaubert's apt designation as "the hermit of Croisset," Unwin discusses the author's quasi-religious devotion to his art and the convergence of health problems and family resources that made such devotion possible. Michael Tilby elaborates on Flaubert's role in literary history in chapter 2. He elucidates Flaubert's literary tastes and production in formal and thematic terms, noting his break with Stendhalian and Balzacian narration, for example, through an ever decreasing reliance on direct speech, and arguing for the influence Flaubert had not only on those long associated with him (Maupassant, Zola, Huysmans) but also on figures such as Robbe-Grillet. [End Page 130] The three essays that follow examine specific portions of the author's corpus. Unwin returns in chapter 3 to take up Flaubert's early work, highlighting some of its points of continuity with later texts--most notably in the author's preoccupation with history and literary representation. One dramatic change over Flaubert's career concerns the spontaneity of his early writing, which, Unwin notes, came with a speed astonishing to anyone familiar with the travails Flaubert described when composing later texts. In chapter 4, Adrianne Tooke considers the travel writings of this author who disdained the genre. However, as Tooke argues, travel writing provided a space for developing his novelistic aesthetic, whether by recording the vivid sights of Egypt that continued to shape his imagination or seeking beauty in the "mess of human lives" he observed, a practice Flaubert put to work in narratives casting even the coarsest reality in beautiful prose. Rosemary Lloyd turns to Flaubert's correspondence in chapter 5, which offers another view into his developing aesthetic as well as the personal opinions he effaced from published work. Lloyd underscores Flaubert's emphasis on facts and details in his letters, in addition to his explicit realization that detachment from his subjects and a "scattering" of his personality among different characters were necessary to effective storytelling. The essays shift to broader questions of theme and composition in chapter 6 with Anne Green's study of Flaubert's representation of history. More than discussing the depiction of specific events, Green argues for the importance of Flaubert's understanding of historiography, noting the parallels he saw between historians and novelists, both of whom choose a perspective and give shape to what they recount. Mary Orr's provocative study of death in chapter 7 shows how Flaubert reconfigured the death scene of classical texts and concluded his narratives not with deaths, but with a post mortem that seems to offer an unambiguous moral interpretation in spite of any undecidability that precedes it. Orr argues against the coupling of death and the feminine in Flaubert, highlighting post mortem judgments that condemn not heroines such as Emma Bovary, but society for its lack of humanity. Laurence Porter's enlightening look at characterization in chapter 8 dissects the components of Flaubert's characters and persuasively [End Page 131] posits a central opposition of blindness and insight subtending not only his characters' narrative function, but also the phases of his writing career. In chapter 9, Alison Finch examines Flaubert's stylistic innovations, including the gap he placed between (beautiful) writing and (potentially abhorrent) subject matter, the suggestiveness of his language, and his novel use of the imperfect tense, the latter bringing his narratives closer to the present tense of poetry and twentieth-century fiction. Tony Williams sifts through the implications of Flaubert's copious notes, sketches, and drafts for current scholarship in chapter 10. He underscores the insights these materials provide into Flaubert's writing process while acknowledging the difficulties of making them widely available. Editors must decide, for example, how to transcribe old printed proofs scrawled over with corrections...