ABSTRACT
Convention shift in Madame Bovary (1857) involves a move away from the authorization of the novel as social commentary through a didactic and socially inscribed narrator, and a shift in the location of aesthetic authority which promotes the text itself as artefact and changes the participant roles of author and reader. This requires not only a revision of the audience’s perception of the function of the novel, but also a revision of the reader’s perceptions of interactions involved in the novel as cultural object. In this shift, the pragmatic circumstances of the circulation of the written text-the mutual absence of writer and reader from each other’s act of writing and reading, and the reader’s awareness of his membership of an audience of many readers-are exploited by Flaubert. Rather than present a fictional world which is consistently mediated by the interpersonal relationship of fictional teller and hearer, narrator and narratee, Flaubert presents the reader with a fictional world which he must interpret through attention to the structure and patterning of the text as a construction in language.
