Gustave Flaubert in the context of "Cabiria"

Salammbô is an 1862 historical novel by Gustave Flaubert. It is set in Carthage immediately before and during the Mercenary Revolt (241–237 BCE). Flaubert's principal source was Book I of the Histories, written by the Greek historian Polybius. The novel was enormously popular when first published and jumpstarted a renewed interest in the history of the Roman Republic's conflict with the North African Phoenician outpost of Carthage.

Honoré de Balzac (/ˈbæl.zæk/ BAL-zak, more commonly US: /ˈbɔːl.-/ BAWL-; French: [ɔnɔʁe d(ə) balzak]; born Honoré Balzac; 20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.

Owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. His writing influenced many famous writers, including the novelists Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and filmmakers François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films and continue to inspire other writers. James called him "really the father of us all."

Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward Said, in which he establishes the term "Orientalism" as a critical concept to describe the Western world's commonly contemptuous depiction and portrayal of the Eastern world (or, the Orient). Societies and peoples of the Orient are those who inhabit regions throughout Asia and North Africa. Said argues that Orientalism, in the sense of the Western scholarship about the Eastern world, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power.

According to Said, in the Middle East, the social, economic, and cultural practices of the ruling Arab elites indicate they are imperial satraps who have internalized a romanticized version of Arab culture created by French and British (and later, American) Orientalists. Examples used in the book include critical analyses of the colonial literature of Gustave Flaubert.

Ten Novels and Their Authors (originally published as Great Novelists and Their Novels) is a 1948 work of literary criticism by William Somerset Maugham. Maugham collects together what he considers to have been the ten greatest novels and writes about the books and the authors. The ten novels are:

1. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding (1749)
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
3. The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830)
4. Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1835)
5. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1849)
6. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
9. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky (1880)
10. War and Peace by Tolstoy (1869)

This book was originally a series of magazine articles commissioned by Redbook.

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant (UK: /ˈmoʊpæsɒ̃/, US: /ˈmoʊpəsɒnt, ˌmoʊpəˈsɒ̃/; French: [ɡi d(ə) mopasɑ̃]; 5 August 1850 – 6 July 1893) was a 19th-century French author, celebrated as a master of the short story, as well as a representative of the naturalist school, depicting human lives, destinies and social forces in disillusioned and often pessimistic terms.

Maupassant was a protégé of Gustave Flaubert and his stories are characterized by economy of style and efficient, seemingly effortless dénouements. Many are set during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s, describing the futility of war and the innocent civilians who, caught up in events beyond their control, are permanently changed by their experiences. He wrote 300 short stories, six novels, three travel books, and one volume of verse. His first published story, "Boule de Suif" ("The Dumpling", 1880), is often considered his most famous work.

Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier (US: /ɡoʊˈtjeɪ/ goh-TYAY; French: [pjɛʁ ʒyl teɔfil ɡotje]; 30 August 1811 – 23 October 1872) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic.

While an ardent defender of Romanticism, Gautier's work is difficult to classify and remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism. He was widely esteemed by writers as disparate as Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, James, Proust and Wilde.

Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners (French: Madame Bovary : Mœurs de province, pronounced [madam bɔvaʁi mœʁ(s) də pʁɔvɛ̃s]), commonly known as simply Madame Bovary, is the début novel of French writer Gustave Flaubert, originally published in 1856 and 1857. The eponymous character, Emma Bovary, lives beyond her means in order to escape the ennui of provincial life.

When the novel was first serialised in Revue de Paris between 1 October and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked it on the grounds that it was obscene. The resulting trial in January 1857 rendered it notorious. Following Flaubert's acquittal on 7 February 1857, Madame Bovary became a bestseller in April 1857 when it was published in two volumes. A seminal work of literary realism, the novel is now ranked among Flaubert's masterpieces, and one of the most influential literary works in history.

Robert André Edouard Baldick, FRSL, (9 November 1927 – 24 April 1972) was a British scholar of French literature, writer, translator and joint editor of the Penguin Classics series with Betty Radice. He was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.

He wrote eight books, including biographies of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Frédérick Lemaître, and Henry Murger, and a history of the Siege of Paris. In addition, he edited and translated Pages from the Goncourt Journals and other classics of French literature, including Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, as well as works by Chateaubriand and Henri Barbusse and a number of novels by Georges Simenon. In The New Criterion, Eric Ormsby writes that Baldick's The Life of J.-K. Husymans is "able to hold its own with Painter's Proust or Ellman's Joyce".