Flaubert’s classic speaks not only to the social conditions of 19th century France, but also to the consumerist and media-stimulated dissatisfaction we face in the 21st century.

Elizabeth Stice on Flaubert’s enduring warnings

This interplay of death and eros produces a flight of words in Ulysses which signals our fundamental need to give birth to beauty—not simply in the body of another, but in eternity.

Daniel Fitzpatrick on love and death in Joyce’s writing

The self exists to be true to itself, and it can only be so insofar as it sloughs off the heteronomous influences of society. The unhappy result is that “we are all expressive individuals now.”

James Matthew Wilson reviews Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self