Manet, Flaubert, and the Emergence of Modernism

Manet, Flaubert and the Emergence of Modernism weaves together art history and literary criticism in a joint study of the canonical 'fathers' of modernism. In this work, Arden Reed contests the Greenbergian view that equates modernism with purity of formal means. Modernism, he argues, is a matter of genre bending, hybridization, as well as movements between text and image. Focusing on key works by Manet and Flaubert, Reed articulates a novel understanding of the cultural imagination of early modernism. He shows how Manet and Flaubert actively mix and contaminate their work: Flaubert with images, Manet with narration. Moreover, Reed extends the argument to the twentieth century, claiming we cannot understand twentieth century modernism so long as we remain locked within single disciplines.