This publication documents the exhibition Literary Objects: Flaubert and explores the concept of commodity as seen through the writings of Gustave Flaubert.
Organized by Philippe Desan, Professor of Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago, and his graduate and undergraduate students, the exhibition included furniture, paintings, prints, sculpture, and other objets d’art. Together with selected passages from Flaubert, these objects referred to overlapping worlds of the French middle class: the domestic interior, the political arena, the imagined Orient, and the historical past.