"Christophe Ippolito's study of Flaubert's fiction and travel narratives demonstrates how the Flaubertian reader's attitude is reoriented from a plot-centered reading toward a retroactive reading based on the perception of underlying cultural signifiers. It is argued that by strategically pointing to recurrent symbolic artifacts, character types, intertexts, or tropes, Flaubert's narratives shape a system of representation that is progressively memorized by the reader as a coherent hermeneutic model for the reception of his "oeuvre.""--BOOK JACKET.