Fictions of female adultery, 1684-1890
Subtitle: theories and circumtexts
By: Bill Overton.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 284
Subjects: English fiction -- History and criticism; Adultery in literature; Literature, Comparative -- English and French; Literature, Comparative -- French and English; French fiction -- History and criticism; Women in literature
Description: "Fictions of Female Adultery, 1864-1890 begins by discussing previous attempts to theorize the novel of adultery, and by arguing for an historically-based approach through study of novels by Goethe, Rousseau and others. Three chapters on adultery fiction in eighteenth-century Britain then deal with a wide range of writers from Aphra Behn to Mary Wollstonecraft. A further two chapters on later nineteenth-century French adultery fiction focus on Zola, Huysmans and Maupassant among others.

Early British adultery fiction was mainly female-authored and concerned with problems created for women by men; nineteenth-century adultery fiction was almost exclusively male-authored and is concerned with wifely adultery and its potential for social disruption.

By considering adultery fiction in France after Madame Bovary, and by contrasting this tradition with that of eighteenth-century Britain, the book brings out what is at issue in both, and suggests that the nineteenth-century novel of adultery should be seen as part of the history of misogynism."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-264) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: I THEORIES; title: 1 Theorizing the Novel of Wifely Adultery 3; title: 2 Tony Tanner: Adultery in the Novel 20; title: 3 Children and Childlessness in the Novel of Wifely 49; title: Adultery; title: II CIRCUMTEXTS; title: 4 Adultery in Early British Fiction 71; title: 5 Ideology of Femininity and Criminal Conversation: 102; title: 1728-71; title: 6 Adultery, Revolution and Reaction: 1773-1814 131; title: 7 After Madame Bovary: Female Adultery in Zola 154; title: 8 Parody, Entropy, Eclipse: Huysmans, Ceard, 187; title: Maupassant.