Flaubert's Salammbao
Deurr, Volker
With Salammbô, Flaubert turned to the old Orient and Carthage's civil war with its mercenaries to relive his travels in the Levant and indulge in erotic and heroic reveries. Yet his alluring heroine gives way to political and military matters that take up two-thirds of the text and makes the Orient, conceived as the «other, » the same: an allegory of Flaubert's France. Political chaos and desperate military situations produce the charismatic l...