Madame Bovary is the French writer Gustave Flaubert's debut novel. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was a notorious perfectionist and claimed always to be searching for le mot juste ("the precise word"). Long established as one of the greatest novels ever written, the book has often been described as a "perfect" work of fiction. Henry James writes: "Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone; it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment." Giorgio de Chirico said that in his opinion "from the narrative point of view, the most perfect book is Madame Bovary by Flaubert".

In Genius Envy, Adrianna M. Paliyenko uncovers a forgotten history: the multiplicity and diversity of nineteenth-century French women’s poetic voices. Conservative critics of the time attributed the phenomenon of genius to masculinity and dismissed the work of female authors as “feminine literature.” Despite the efforts of leading thinkers, critics, and literary historians to erase women from the pages of literary history, Paliyenko shows how these female poets invigorated the debate about the origins of genius and garnered considerable recognition in their time for their creativity and bold aesthetic ideas. This fresh account of French women poets’ contributions to literature probes the history of their critical reception. The result is an encounter with the texts of celebrated writers such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Anaïs Ségalas, Malvina Blanchecotte, Louisa Siefert, and Louise Ackermann. Glimpses at the different stages of each poet’s career show that these women explicitly challenged the notion of genius as gender specific, thus advocating for their rightful place in the canon. A prodigious contribution to studies of nineteenth-century French poetry, Paliyenko’s book reexamines the reception of poetry by women within and beyond its original context. This balanced and comprehensive treatment of their work uncovers the multiple ways in which women poets sought to define their place in history.

The suite of forty prints published in Geneva in 1570 depicting the wars, massacres and troubles of the French Wars of Religion may have been the first picture history made in woodcuts or etchings that promised a geenral public a true view of great events of the recent past. This richly illustrated study reconstructs the gradual elaboration of this experimental work, situating it within the previously untold story of the use of the graphic arts to report the news in the fist centuries of European printmaking. Successive chapters explore the pictorial traditions that inspired the printmakers, examine how they gathered their information, assess the reliability of the scenes, and analyze the historical vision informing the series. Part 2 reproduces the full suite with commentary in double page fold-outs. Through the study of a single print series, lost chapters in the history of jorunalism, of the graphic arts, and of Protestant historical consciousness re-emerge.

In Virgil's third Eclogue, Palaemon concludes the poetry competition between Menalcas and Damoetas by saying that he cannot choose between them, a judgment that is emblematic of the contest between Neo-Latin and vernacular poetry in Renaissance France. Both forms of poetry draw on similar roots, both are equally accomplished, and the contest between them is largely amicable. The Judgment of Palaement illustrates the almost symbiotic relationship between Renaissance Latin and French poetry, while exploring poets' motivation for choosing one language over another, the different challenges each form of writing involved, and the extent of the collaboration between different language communities. It focuses on some of the major writers of the period, as well as less known ones, and on genres specific to humanist poetry. It shows that composing in Latin was often considered more natural than writing in the vernacular, at a time when many Frenchmen's mother tongue was a non-standard French dialect or distinct language. Book jacket.