Airline comedy, Flaubert, the hotness of Jane Eyre, Renaissance book wheels, Taylor Swift, Jane Austen, and a Saxon Psalter.

The irregular book review review. vol. III

Politicised arts commentary

Helen Lewis

has written about the decline of professional comedy as it reaches for the low-hanging fruit of being anti-woke. Arguing that there is too much politicization of arts criticism, Helen writes: “We’ve switched from a review culture (is this well directed? acted? written?) to an opinion culture (what does it say about the Yanamamo).” Hear, hear. More Sontagian criticism, please.

Flaubert

A lovely essay about Flaubert’s devotion to Art (which he always capitalised) and his lifelong aversion to middle-class society. The opening describes how students find Madame Bovary boring or hate it because they hate Emma Bovary’s selfishness. (They may be interested to learn that Flaubert hate his characters, too.) But Flaubert is an unavoidable part of the history of the novel, influencing Zola and Proust and Tolstoy and Joyce and many others. As Scott Bradfield says, “It’s impossible to think of any other writer who proved such a large influence on two seemingly antithetical schools of fiction—both the “realistic novel” and the “romance.””

And here is James Wood’s 1999 essay about Flaubert and literary history, a classic.