‘Nous sommes tous nés nomades’ (Flaubert): connecting the aesthetic compass of travel writing in Flaubert’s Salammbô and Fromentin’s Dominique of 1862

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