Fictions of female adultery, 1684-1890

Bill Overton

"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,...

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