Papá Goriot y Bouvard y Pécuchet: la novela francesa decimonónica evalúa los problemas de la modernidad Papá Goriot y Bouvard y Pécuchet: la novela francesa decimonónica evalúa los problemas de la modernidad

Abstract

The Modern Age, inaugurated in the Renaissance, owes its consolidation to the events of the French Revolution (1789). With it came not only a structural transformation of French, European and Western society, but also an ethical and existential change: the transition from a system of values founded on the imprint of the Catholic Church to one of a secular and secular character. This phenomenon and its human repercussions were the central concerns of most nineteenth-century novelists. This article studies in compared perspective the aesthetic bets of Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert in their novels Papa Goriot and Bouvard and Pécuchet respectively, in relation to their ways of capturing the historical juncture from the compositional proposal of the pieces.