‘Nous sommes tous nés nomades.’ The Pictorial Compasses of Fromentin’s Dominique and Flaubert’s Salammbô of 1862

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article takes its lead from Barbara Wright’s simple yet profound literary-critical imperative, ‘“Only Connect” … ’ (2010), to reflect Fromentin’s Dominique critically in Flaubert’s Salammbô – and vice versa – by means of the aesthetic compasses of critical reader response in 1862, and their authors’ earlier travel writing. In therefore arguing by example for renewed examination of important works in word and image in Second Empire France that appear the same year, the article reorientates twenty-first-century critical debate concerning the status and aesthetic perspectives of mature, representative, enduring and canonical works in nineteenth-century French and Francophone Studies.