SOURCE: "The Problem of Style in Realistic Representation: Marx and Flaubert," in The Concept of Style, edited by Berel Lang, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979, pp. 213-29.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1977, White examines affinities between the realistic style of Flaubert's Sentimental Education and Marx's historical and ideological rendering of nineteenth-century French history in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Prior to the nineteenth century, the problem of style in literature turned upon discussion of techniques of rhetorical composition and especially techniques of figuration by which to generate a secondary or allegorical meaning in the text beyond the literal meaning displayed on its surface. But the advent of realism meant, among other things, the rejection of allegory, the search for a perfect literality of expression, and the achievement of a style from which every element of rhetorical artifice had been expunged. For Flaubert, for...