Lit227 Adultery and the Novel

Reading Lists
Week 1 - General

Annette Lawson, Adultery: An Analysis of Love and Betrayal (Oxford, 1988)

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (1976-84)
Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation (1986)
Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore, 1981) [Introductory
chapter available in reading folder in students’ room]
Reay Tannahill, Sex in History (1980)

Some websites:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01163a.htm [Catholic Encyclopaedia - web version: entry for

adultery]
http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/english/ad/Adultery.html [Webster’s
Dictionary definition - includes some links to interesting works of art associated with adultery]

Self-help sites related to adultery:

http://www.divorceinfo.com/adultery.htm
http://www.geocities.com/southbeach/lounge/9071/
http://www.cheaterbuster.com/
http://www.gloryb.com/
***

Week 2 – Launcelot and Guinevere

a.) Arthurian Romance

Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain (1136), trans. Lewis Thorpe
Thomas Mallory, The Most Piteous Tale of the Morte Arthur Sans Guerdon
Chrétien de Troyes, The Knight of the Cart (c.1170), in Arthurian Romances, trans. W. Kibler
(1991)

b.) Arthurian Romance in the C19th

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Guinevere’ and ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ from Idylls of the King (1859)
William Morris, ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ (1891)
Sara Teasdale ‘Guenevere’ (1911)
These and other nineteenth-century versions of this story are available online at
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/guinmenu.htm
For a general site containing information on Idylls of the King see:
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/idylls/iotkov.html

Secondary Reading
Judith Armstrong, Adultery in the Novel (1976)
Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (1940), trans. by Montgomery Belgion
(Princeton, 1983)
W.A.N. Cross, and Tom Peete, Lancelot and Guenevere: A Study on the Origins of Courtly Love
(1930)
René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, 1961)
Antony Harrison, ‘Arthurian Poetry and Medievalism’ in Blackwell’s Companion to Victorian
Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin et al (Oxford, 2002) [Available online through www.literature-
compass.com]
Peter Korrel, An Arthurian Triangle: A Study of the Origin, Development and Characterization of
Arthur, Guinevere and Modred. Leiden: (E. J. Brill, 1984)
C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford, 1936), p.1.
Charles Moorman, ‘Courtly Love in Malory’, ELH 27:3 (1960), 163-76 [Available online through
JSTOR]
Susan Samples, ‘Guinevere: A Re-Appraisal’, Arthurian Interpretations 3.2 (1989): 106-18.
***

Week 3 – The Country Wife

William Wycherly, The Country Wife (1675)

Sources:
Moliere [Jean-Baptiste Poquelin], École des femmes (1662) [The School for Wives]
Terence, The Eunuch

For comparison:
Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Miller’s Tale’ and ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ from The Canterbury Tales
(c.1400) in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson (Oxford, 1987)
William Shakespeare, Othello, Cymbeline and A Winter’s Tale in The Norton Complete Works of
Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Don Giovanni (1787)
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/dongiovanni/catalogue.html [Website with sound file
and libretto of the catalogue aria.]
http://www.sensible.it/personal/resio/donjuan/ [Website devoted to tellings of Don Juan story]

Secondary Reading
E. Burns, Restoration comedy : crises of desire and identity (1987)
R. Braverman, Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature,
1660-1730 (1993)
Douglas Canfield, ‘Tupping Your Rival's Women: Cit-Cuckolding as Class Warfare in Restoration
Comedy’, in Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama, ed. Katherine-M.
Quinsey (Kentucky, 1996), pp.113-28
Bernard Capp, ‘The Double Standard Revisited’, Past and Present 162 (1999), 70-100.
Sue Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (1996)
Laurence Stone, The Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987 (Oxford, 1992)
Keith Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959), 195-216
[Photocopies in reading folder]
——. ‘The Puritans and Adultery’, in Puritans and Revolutionaries, ed. Thomas & Pennington
(Oxford, 1978), pp.257-82.
***

Weeks 4 & 5 – Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1855)

——.The Sentimental Education (1869)
——. Three Stories (1877)
——. Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881)

Some near contemporary views

Henry James, ‘Gustave Flaubert’ (2 essays), in Selected Critical
Writings [Photocopies in reading folder]
Marcel Proust, ‘On the Style of Flaubert’, in Against Sainte-Beuve
and other Essays, trans. John Sturrock (1988) Photocopies in
reading folder]
Biographical Sources:
Francis Steegmuller, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857 (1981) [Photocopies of
chapter relating to Madame Bovary in reading folder]
Herbert Lottman, Flaubert: A Biography (1989)
Geoffrey Wall, Flaubert: A Life (2001) [Less good than Lottman, but based on more recent
research]

Secondary Reading
Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty: Revised Edition (1985)
Alison Fairlie, Flaubert: Madame Bovary (1962) [NB: Quotations in French]
Stephen Heath, Gustave Flaubert: ‘Madame Bovary’ (1992)
Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert (Cambridge,
1986)
Maria Rippon, Judgment and Justification in the Nineteenth-Century Novel of Adultery
(Greenwood, 2002)
Naomi Segal, Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990's (Palgrave
Macmillan, 1997)
R.J. Sherrington, Three Novels by Flaubert (Oxford, 1970)
Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore, 1981)
Timothy Unwin (ed.) A Cambridge Companion to Gustave Flaubert (Cambridge, 2004)
Nicholas White, Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction (Cambridge, 1999)

Some websites
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/jb.guinot/pages/accueil.html [in French]
http://www.robotwisdom.com/flaubert/ [Eclectic and not always accurate, but in English]
http://www.salon.com/sept97/bovary970915.html [American author, Erica Jong, on Madame
Bovary.]
***

Week 6 – Tristan and Isolde

Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde (1866)

——. Prelude and Transfiguration from ‘Tristan and Isolde’, ed. Robert Bailey (Norton, 1985)
[Available through Music Library]
Friedrich Niezsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1871)

Sources
Joseph Bédier, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, trans. Hilaire Bellec (1913)
Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, trans. A.H. Hatto (1960) [includes a translation of ‘The Tristan
of Thomas’]

Secondary Reading
René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961), trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, 1965)
Michael and Linda Hutcheon, Opera: The Art of Dying (Harvard, 2004)
——. Bodily Charm: Living Opera (Nebraska, 2001)
Denis de Rougement, Love in the Western World
Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner (1988)
Roger Scruton, Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’
(Oxford, 2004)
Richard Sennett, ‘Playing away - adultery portrayed through opera’, New Statesman 4 December
2000 [Available online]
Michael Tanner, Wagner (Princeton, 1996)

Some Websites
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/T/Tr/Tristan_chord.htm [An analysis of the
‘Tristan Chord’ from the opening to Wagner’s opera]
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/trismenu.htm [General site listing various re-tellings of the
Tristan story]
http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/ [online English translations of Wagner’s prose
works]

See also the musical recordings available through the Naxos listing on the Library’s electronic resources
page.
***

Weeks 7 & 8 – Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)

——. The Kreutzer Sonata
——. War and Peace (1869)
——. What is Art?
st
N.G. Chernyshevskii, What Is to Be Done?, trans. Michael R. Katz (Cornell, 1989 (1 pub.1863))

Secondary Reading
Matthew Arnold, ‘Count Leon Tolstoy’ in Essays in Criticism (1888)
John Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel (1966)
Harold Bloom, ed., Tolstoy: Modern Critical Views (1991)
——, ed. ‘Anna Karenina’: Modern Critical Views (1987)
A.V. Knowles, Tolstoy: The Critical Heritage
F.R. Leavis, ‘Anna Karenina’ in [Missing] [Copies in Reading Folder]
Naomi Segal, Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990's (Palgrave
Macmillan, 1997)
Donna Tussing Orwin, A Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy (Cambridge, 2002)