Summary:
This thesis examines the link between Flaubert's dramatic poem in prose La Tentation de Saint Antoine and Athanasius' of Alexandria hagiography Life of Antony. It highlights the historical framework of Flaubert's time on the one hand and of Saint Antony's the Great on the other, constructing a narrative of the political and social crises, that, as a result, depicts a climate of uncertainty of the human existence, in the 19th and 3d AD centuries. Saint Anthony the Great, as the archetypal ascetic figure through the ages, serves as the ideal example of ascetic practice within a religious context and as an inspiration to literary and artistic circles as well. He departs for the desert in order to intensify his ascetic practice, devoting himself completely to his faith towards God. Flaubert composes an allegorical text, consisting of a series of Anthony's hallucinations, in which, the saint acts as his literary alter ego. Fascinated by the Eastern culture and the religious and mystical traditions, that emerged from the late first century AD onwards, in La Tentation, Flaubert expresses his creative consciousness through an ascetic devotion to art. Realizing that the new bourgeois status quo affects not only the person's existential identity but also the literary field, he refuses to compromise his values and chooses to practice an ascetic lifestyle in order to preserve his identity in terms of existence and cultivate obsessively the form in terms of literature respectively. The study concludes with an examination of the influence that Athanasius' and Flaubert's narratives, had in literature and the arts.
Keywords:
Gustave Flaubert, Saint Antoine, asceticism, temptation, aestheticism, dialogism, intermediality, 19th century, France, 4th century, Egypt
