Gustave Flaubert: Écrivain-Voyageur Ou Voyageur-Écrivain?

Abstract

Gustave Flaubert, the nineteenth-century realist writer known for his unique way of writing his novels, for his impersonal and impassive techniques that highly featured at the time, was also tempted by the fashionable travel diary although for him travel nurtured his later literary creation and self-discovery, alongside his power of suggestion. Our study is intended, first, to review the term travel as a literary genre and the travel story as a variant of writing over the centuries, and then, to thoroughly analyse the status of the realistic writer Flaubert, perpetually balancing two trends: a writer-traveller and a traveller-writer.