Popular fiction and shopping: images of women's genres in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Miroslav Krleža's Tri kavaljera frajle Melanije

Grdešić, Maša. (2007). Popular fiction and shopping: images of women's genres in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Miroslav Krleža's Tri kavaljera frajle Melanije. In: Komparativna povijest hrvatske književnosti – Zbornik radova IX. (Hrvatska književnost XX. stoljeća u prijevodima: emisija i recepcija), 2006., Split.

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Abstract

Employing the concept of modernity as a cultural era instead of modernism as a specific form of artistic production offers a theoretically justified space for a comparative analysis of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Miroslav Krleža's Tri kavaljera frajle Melanije. The fact that both the novels' heroines are passionate readers of popular fiction could thus become more than a shared literary motif. Issues that this paper therefore attempts to consider include precise information on the popular romances in question, such as which novels do Emma and Melanija read, how, when, and why they read them, and furthermore, could this obssesion with popular fiction be understood as one possible representation of women's everyday life in a cultural and historical era marked by the entrance of mass produced (and published) goods into the private sphere of the home. Literary representations of women's everyday life, which include banal practices such as romance reading, shopping, and sewing, are especially useful to scholars interested in the history of women's popular culture or, more accurately, women's genres – a theoretical encounter between literary and cultural studies.

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