"Madame Bovary was one of the most influential literary achievements of the nineteenth century and gained immediate notoriety through its questioning of marriage, sex, and the role of women. Stephen Heath shows how this landmark text captures and definingly represents a fundamental experience of the post-romantic, commercial-industrial, emotional-democratic period. Drawing on the terms of Flaubert's intense reaction against what was seen as the stifling mediocrity of bourgeois culture, he shows how an imagination of style and artistic impersonality comes to produce in the writing of Emma bovary, the provincial 'heroine', a new problematic version of both woman and art. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET.