"praise for the Italian edition: ""I read this book with passion from beginning to end."--Pierre Bourdieu "A remarkable study of "King Lear" . . . an extremely interesting and, I think, tenable thesis . . . at least as tenable as Ernest Jones's study of Hamlet's oedipal fixation."--Anthony Burgess "I was truly fascinated by this book, which introduces a totally unexpected, though perfectly plausible and, in a sense, obvious, reading of "Madame Bovary," From now on, it will be impossible to ignore this work whenever a study of Flaubert's novel is undertaken."--Jean-Pierre Richard

Madame Bovary was one of the most influential literary achievements of the nineteenth century and gained immediate notoriety through its questioning of marriage, sex, and the role of women. Stephen Heath shows how this landmark text captures and articulates a fundamental experience of the post-romantic, commercial-industrial, emotional-democratic period. He explains how Madame Bovary represents Flaubert's intense personal engagement with the tragedy of bourgeois culture, while at the same time exemplyfying the author's commitment to the impersonality of Art and the transcendence of style. The novel is set in its literary and historical context and there is a guide to further reading.

Examining the political legacies of the Duvalier period and after, and revisiting the work of the late David Nicholls, Politics and Power in Haiti provides some of the keys to understanding the turbulent world of Haitian politics and the persistent challenges at home and from abroad which have distorted development.

Challenging readers to rethink what they read and why, the author questions the aesthetic assumptions that have led to the devaluing of fanfiction--a genre criticized as both tasteless and derivative--and other "guilty pleasure" reading (and writing), including romance and fantasy. The complicated relationship between "fanfic" and intellectual property rights is discussed in light of the millennia-old tradition of derivative literature, before modern copyright law established originality as the hallmark of great fiction. "Absorbed reading"--the practice of immersing oneself in the narrative versus critically "reading from a distance"--is a strong motive for the appropriation by fanfiction of canon characters and worlds.

Gustave Flaubert is probably the most famous novelist of nineteenth-century France, and his best known work, Madame Bovary, is read in numerous comparative literature and French courses. His fiction set the standard to which other authors turned to learn their craft, and his cult of art and his unrelenting search for stylistic perfection inspired many later writers, such as Maupassant, Proust, Conrad, Faulkner, and Joyce. His denunciation of materialistic, corrupt society; his fascination with altered states of consciousness; his oscillation between metaphysical longings and a radical nihilism; and his deep-seated mistrust of the adequacy of words themselves anticipate the works of contemporary authors. This reference is a convenient guide to his life and writings. Included in this volume are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries on Flaubert's individual works and major characters; historical persons and events that shaped his life; the themes that run throughout his writings; the critical approaches employed by scholars studying his works; and related topics of interest. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and most close with a brief bibliography. All of his major works are treated at length, and the volume mentions nearly every unpublished project of his that has a title. The book concludes with a selected, general bibliography of major studies.

Patricia Rae's study, while accepting Rorty's view that there is philosophical solidarity between pragmatism and modernism, rejects his interpretation of both as forms of dogmatic skepticism. If pragmatism and modernism coincide, Rae argues, the case of these three writers suggests that the intersection lies not in a rejection of "truthfulness to experience" but in a cautious respect for it.