Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception by Gustave Flaubert
Published 2004 · 151,525 words · about 10 hours at an average pace
How hard is Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception to read?
Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception scores 65 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 68 out of 100
- Precise nineteenth-century French, exactingly translated.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Long, balanced, famously worked sentences.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Concrete provincial detail carrying constant judgement.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Very dense in observation.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- Free indirect style, so the reader is never sure whose judgement is being reported.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The wedding cake, the blind beggar and the agricultural fair are sustained emblems.
- Ironic distance: 88 out of 100
- The irony is total and pitiless; it is what the book is famous for.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- The plot closes, but the moral judgement is withheld.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- Linear, in three parts.
How Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception is regarded
Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception holds a literary regard score of 95 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.