Legendary Figures examines revolutionary views of the past that have played a crucial role in European and American literature of the last 150 years. Clayton Koelb traces these new approaches to history through an impressive range of novels, from Flaubert's Salammb to Christa Wolf's Cassandra. Koelb argues that this new "historical sense," which arose in the mid-nineteenth century, gained eloquent expression in Flaubert's...