In a very witty essay written in 1935, Cyril Connolly demanded that a whole family of conventions should be butchered—“all novels dealing with more than one generation or with any period before 1918 or with brilliant impoverished children in rectories,” all novels set in Hampshire, Sussex, Oxford, Cambridge, the Essex coast, Wiltshire, Cornwall, Kensington, Chelsea, Hampstead, Hyde Park, and Hammersmith.

“Many situations should be forbidden, all getting and losing of jobs, proposals of marriage, reception of love-letters by either sex…all allusion to illness or suicide (except insanity), all quotations, all mentions of genius, promise, writing, painting, sculpting, art, poetry, and the phrases “I like your stuff,” “what’s his stuff like?” “Damned good,” “Let me make you some coffee,” all young men with ambition or young women with emotion, all remarks like “Darling, I’ve found the most wonderful cottage” (flat, castle), “Ask me any other time, dearest, only please—just this once—not now,” “Love you—of course I love you” (don’t love you)—and “It’s not that, it’s only that I feel so terribly tired.”
Forbidden names: Hugo, Peter, Sebastian, Adrian, Ivor, Julian, Pamela, Chloe, Enid, Inez, Miranda, Joanna, Jill, Felicity, Phyllis.
Forbidden faces: all young men with curly hair or remarkable eyes, all gaunt haggard thinkers’ faces, all faunlike characters, anybody over six feet, or with any distinction whatever, and all women with a nape to their neck (he loved the way her hair curled in the little hollow at the nape of her neck).”

--How Fiction Works, James Wood (2008)

Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him. There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his ifnluence is almost too familiar to be visible. We hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You can find some of this in defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert....
...Flaubert perfected a technique that is essential to realist narration: the confusing of habitual detail with dynamic detail. Obviously, in that Paris street, the women cannot be yawning for the same length of time as the washing is quivering or the newspapers lying on the tables. Flaubert's details belong to different time signatures, some instantaneous and some recurrent, yet they are smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously.

--How Fiction works, James Wood, (2008)