Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s [Paperback]

Scarlet Letters explores the fascination exerted by adultery throughout the long history of western cultures. Critics from the UK, USA and Australia, working in a variety of specialisms, have contributed to this substantial new collection of close readings and wider contextualisations. As well as focusing on the bourgeois nineteenth century as the high age of representations of adultery, the book offers historicist and psychoanalytic analyses of texts ranging from the Amphitryon myth to Fatal Attraction and The Piano .Notes on the Contributors - Introduction: The Present State of Affairs; N.White - BEFORE MODERNITY - The Heirs of Amphitryon: Social Fathers and Natural Fathers; M.Maclean - Adultery and Killing in La Mort le roi Artu; S.Kay - Adultery on Trial: Martin Guerre and His Wife: From Judge's Tale to the Screen; E.Guild - EARLY MODERN - Notorious Women: Marriage and the Novel in Crisis in France 1690-1710; J.Dejean - 'Let Other Pens Dwell on Guilt and Misery': Adultery in Jane Austen; C.Lamont - THE HIGH AGE OF ADULTERY: CONTEXTS - Legitimation and Irony in Tolstoy and Fontane; F.Gordon - Adultery and the Exchange Economy; J.Labanyi - The Adulteress's Children; N.Segal -Carnal Knowledge in French Naturalist Fiction; N.White - Patriarchal Ideology and the Novel of Adultery; D.A.Williams - THE HIGH AGE OF ADULTERY: TEXTS - No Fairy-Tale: the Story of Marriage in Trollope's He Knew He Was Right; M.Hamer - Machado de Assis and the Beloved Reader: Squatters in the Text; M.M.Lisboa - The Need for Zeal and the Dangers of Jealousy: Identity and Legitimacy in La Regenta; A.Sinclair - FILMS AND FICTIONS - No Second Chances: Fiction and Adultery in Vertigo; M.Wood - The Fatal Attraction of The Piano; N.Segal - Dissolving Adultery: Domesticity and Obscenity in The Game; J.Smith - Index