When the 'herstory' deconstructs the case of hysteria...

Reviewed by: Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial from "Madame Bovary" to "Lolita." Allison Pease Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial from "Madame Bovary" to "Lolita." By Elisabeth Ladenson . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. Pp. 272. $52.50 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). Does reading about others who have sex make us want to have sex too? And is that so bad? Though video has replaced books as today's media demon of choice, for about one hundred years, from 1857 to 1961, France, Britain, and the United States prosecuted and attempted to ban books that contained any material thought to corrupt or deprave its readers, most commonly, books with sexual content. In hindsight, what makes this prosecutorial practice seem not only pointless but also counterproductive is that most of the books that went to trial became not just causes célèbres but literary classics, frequently forming the backbone of today's college syllabi. Elisabeth Ladenson begins Dirt for Art's Sake asking, "How does an obscene work become a classic?" While she doesn't directly answer that question, she does provide a comprehensive and often witty account of the authorial investment, publication, and trials of seven significant books in modern Western literature: Madame Bovary, Flowers of Evil, Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Lolita. Far more a literary history than a cultural critique, Dirt for Art's Sake offers little new information and no new theories that help the reader understand the cultural causes or effects of canonical obscenity. What the book does offer, however, is the most comprehensive account of three national traditions of obscenity trials and, by doing so, a taxonomy of modern literary censorship and its resistance. Ladenson divides the writers in her study into three groups: amoralists, immoralists, and moralists. Though each wrote works offensive to public taste, their motives and modes of doing so were clearly different. In terms of canonical longevity, the amoralist line, exemplified by Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Charles Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, has had the most success. Each work treats transgressive subjects-adultery, carnal lust, defecation, pedophilia-as so much clay from which art itself is made. Thus, as Flaubert wrote in a letter before Madame Bovary came to trial, "the morality of art consists in its beauty, and I value above all style, and after that, Truth" (21). At issue, of course, is the function and power of literature. The trials of obscene books reveal a tectonic shift from the nineteenth-century author's presumed obligation to present an ideal to which readers could aspire toward the twentieth-century author's representation of life's most quotidian and unpleasant aspects. The deepening skepticism or anti-idealism of literary representation incorporated bodies and physical acts in ever greater detail. In Flaubert's case, the presumption that literature's proper function is moral was that which brought it to trial but also that which saved it. Madame Bovary, the defense claimed, depicted vice only in order to promote virtue. [End Page 646] Thus began the idea that presenting reality in its ugly details could act as a kind of emetic, purging the reader's soul of its unworthy desires. Before arriving at the consensus that realistic depictions of immoral acts could have positive social effects, however, other works were accused of "vulgar realism offensive to decency," as in the case of Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal in 1857 (48). Flaubert and Baudelaire are both generally credited with having inaugurated modern and modernist literature by transforming the unseemly into art. If the culture of literary litigation was an attempt to control a changing aesthetic sensibility, it was equally instigated by a changing demographic of readers. The concern with literary obscenity was in part that it might fall into the hands of the wrong kinds of readers-girls and semiliterate working-class men-the newest classes of readers in the nineteenth century, who might not understand how to detach themselves from the readings at hand. Where Les fleurs du mal and Madame Bovary suffered because they were "dirty...

The presence of Madame Bovary's story motif (1856) in Indonesian literature, especially Hikayat Siti Mariah (1910--1912) provides evidence that there is a reception of similar between French and Dutch colonial or Indonesian. This paper aims to (1) find out the ideas of the two texts in displaying similar story motif, (2) the form of respons from Madame Bovary (1856) in the Hikayat Siti Mariah (1910--1912), and (3) the significance of Madame Bovary's presence (1856) in the Hikayat Siti Mariah (1910--1912) as a social response. This paper uses a comparative literary point of view by considering the social context as a response. The objects are Madame Bovary (1856) by Gustave Flaubert and Hikayat Siti Mariah (1910--1912) by Hadji Moekti and the significance of the presence of Madame Bovary in Indonesian literature. The research data consists of the content or ideas of the two texts, the spirit of age, and the social context. Data interpretation is done by comparing the content or ideas of the two texts by considering the social context of each text. The results obtained are (1) the two texts present ideas against the bourgeois class resistance by using symbols of women and sexuality, (2) the Hikayat Siti Mariah (1910--1912) takes the motive of the story to attack the Dutch capitalists and liberal groups who construct the identities of the colonized subjects, and (3) the presence of the text of Madame Bovary (1856) in Indonesian literature shows a global anti-colonial spirit. Kehadiran motif cerita Madame Bovary (1856) dalam sastra Indonesia terutama Hikayat Siti Mariah (1910--1912) memberikan bukti terdapat resepsi atas semangat dan persoalan yang serupa antara masyarakat Prancis dan tanah jajahan Belanda atau Indonesia. Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk (1) mengetahui gagasan kedua teks tersebut dalam menampilkan motif cerita yang serupa, (2) mengetahui wujud sambutan dari Madame Bovary (1856) dalam teks Hikayat Siti Mariah (1910--1912), dan (3) mengetahui makna kehadiran Madame Bovary (1856) dalam teks Hikayat Siti Mariah (1910--1912) sebagai satu respon sosial. Tulisan ini mengunakan sudut pandang sastra bandingan dengan mempertimbangkan konteks sosial sebagai satu respon. Objek tulisan ini adalah Madame Bovary (1856) karya Gustave Flaubert dan Hikayat Siti Mariah (1910--1912) karya Hadji Moekti dan makna kehadiran teks Madame Bovary dalam sastra Indonesia. Data penelitian ini terdiri atas isi atau gagasan dari kedua teks, semangat zaman, dan konteks sosial. Interpretasi data dilakukan dengan membandingkan isi atau gagasan kedua teks dengan mempertimbangkan konteks sosial masing-masing teks. Hasil yang diperoleh adalah (1) kedua teks menghadirkan gagasan terhadap perlawanan kelas borjuis dengan memanfaatkan simbol perempuan dan seksualitas, (2) teks Hikayat Siti Mariah (1910--1912) mengambil motif cerita untuk menyerang kaum kapitalis dan golongan liberal Belanda yang mengkonstruksi identitas subjek terjajah, dan (3) kehadiran teks Madame Bovary (1856) dalam sastra Indonesia menunjukan semangat anti penjajahan yang mengglobal terutama kolonialisme.

In her article "Motherhood and Sexuality in Flaubert's Madame Bovary" Amanda Kane Rooks examines the narration of relationships in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary between Emma's role as mother and her sexuality. Rooks argues that this narrative relationship provides a space where the association between the oppressions of motherhood and women's sexuality can be better understood. Further, Rooks posits that Flaubert's narrative condemns the nineteenth-century Western predilection for constructing a relationship of mutual exclusivity between motherhood and sexuality, while it exposes socially sanctioned performances of motherhood and sexuality as allied, perverse manifestations of the same repressive ideological system.

This article starts from the freudian comprehension about female psychic constitution and hysteria as psychological destiny, for this, the article focuses on Madame Bovary, character extracted from Gustave Flaubert’s novel published in France in 1856, the same year that Freud was born. Considered the founder and principal exponent of the literary school of realism, Flaubert created Madame Bovary, a female character with a series of conflicts that portray the European bourgeois customs of the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as make clear the place reserved for women in this cultural context. The little woman - as Flaubert will call the central character during the preparation of the novel - is an important representative of the feminine desire for transformation, but it is possible to realize thesedesires are excessive, which places Madame Bovary in the field of psychopathology affectation. The realism with which Madame Bovary is presented made it widely discussed over the years. When published, it caused impact on French society, and its publication was eventually prohibited. Nevertheless, the story built by Flaubert is still up-to-date because it refers to the riddle of femininity and hysterical pathology, both timeless.Key words: psychoanalysis, hysteria, Madame Bovary, french literature.

Unlike most nineteenth-century novels of female adultery in which the heroine's unhappy end is a function of her having broken social taboos, Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" presents us with a heroine whose suicide, contrary to the reader's expectation, cannot be explained in terms of any social or personal havoc caused by her adulteries. By contesting the expected motives for her suicide-indeed viewing them as so many red herrings laid by Flaubert-this article re-poses and seeks to re-answer the question of what "Madame Bovary" is ultimately about.

Bovarism represents the essential side of the conflict between identity and alterity reflected in the novel Madame Bovary. The concepts of identity and alterity are in a relationship of opposition, identity denoting the fact of being an individual different from everyone else and, at the same time, of remaining the same over time, and alterity being the fact of conceiving one’s own personality as different of how it is in reality, in other words, to consider oneself a different person. The applicability of these concepts to the novel Madame Bovary is visible, if we start from the definition formulated by the French philosopher and essayist Jules de Gaultier (1858-1942), according to which Bovarism represents the faculty acquired by a person to conceive oneself in a different way than in reality, without taking into account the various external events and circumstances that could determine in each individual this inner transformation. According to Gaultier’s theory, when we talk about the conflict between identity and alterity, we refer to a real disease of thought, of soul, of personality, which consists in knowing the image of reality before knowing the actual reality. The prototype of such an approach is embodied by Emma Bovary, dominated by the cleavage between real being and imaginary being. At the base of the conflict between identity and alterity manifested in the form of Bovarism, several main aspects can be delimited which are also this phenomenon causes.

According to Julia Kristeva, ‘... any text is an intertext – the site of an intersection of numberless other texts’ (Kristeva, 1966 as cited in Haberer, 2007). Inspired by and extended from Priscilla Meyer’s journal article Anna Karenina: Tolstoy’s polemic with Madame Bovary corroborating the possibility of Leo Tolstoy being inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in writing Anna Karenina, the present study is a comparative analysis of these two masterpieces exploring their resemblance to claim the latter as an echo of the formerly written; Madame Bovary. As the preliminary stage of the study, the two texts were closely read and analyzed individually. Subsequently, the texts were studied comparatively to identify their similarities. The study led to the discovery that Anna Karenina bears a significant resemblance to Madame Bovary in four dimensions: the plot, themes, characterization and character development, and style. This study is intended to be a foundation for prospective comparative studies based on the two novels.

Some Stylistic Considerations of Free Indirect Discourse in Film Adaptations of Flaubert's Madame Bovary Colin Gardner (bio) Variously known as style indirect libre or erlebte Rede, free indirect discourse has always been of particular interest to both literary and film theorists because of its identification with the modernist innovations of Gustave Flaubert and the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel as well as the narrative properties of traditional Hollywood cinema. Gilles Deleuze, for example, ties it directly to his discussion of what he calls the "perception-image." In film, a perception has two poles, subjective and objective. Thus, "a subjective perception is one in which the images vary in relation to a central and privileged image; an objective perception is one where, as in things, all the images vary in relation to one another, on all their facets and in all their parts."1 However, it is important to note that the narrative film's scopic economy is not a simple binarism between subjective point of view and objective rendering on-screen (expressed most economically, for example, in shot-reverse-shot editing), but also behaves in accordance with a free indirect discourse that is able to express characters' inner states via the mise-en-scène, while the character is also present within the mise-en-scène. The free indirect discourse therefore suggests the possibility of expressing a first-person focalization (inside), while continuing to present the character in the third person (outside). This complication of the subjective-objective duality is acknowledged by Deleuze in his analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Cinema of Poetry"2 and its relation to the free indirect in Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Here, Deleuze argues that the perception-image is often able to override the intentionality of bodily motility (the vectorial space of Deleuze's "action-image") via a form of camera self-consciousness. "We are no longer faced with subjective or objective images," notes Deleuze; "we are caught in a correlation between a perception-image and a camera-consciousness which transforms it (the question of knowing whether the image was objective or subjective is no longer raised)."3 Deleuze calls this "a very [End Page 587] special kind of cinema" because it makes the presence of the camera both felt and palpable.4 In this way, the perception-image takes on the guise of a free indirect subjectivity as soon as it manifests itself through an autonomous camera-consciousness. Consequently, the free indirect allows us to get a clearer idea of how a pure perception-image—with its specific roots in bodily affect—might work when freed from the subjective baggage of suturing film language. Earmarked as a direct advance on, and contrast to, the all-seeing, God's-eye objectivist realist novels of Balzac and Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) is often cited specifically as the prototypical text of this hybrid subjective / objective style, although Pasolini has traced a variation of its use as far back as Dante.5 Given this general hermeneutic regard for the free indirect as a historicizing, ideologically motivated textual practice, the paucity of discussion concerning its application to film is all the more surprising, especially given the import of Deleuze's analysis in both Cinema 1 and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. With that in mind, this essay thus posits the following questions: What is free indirect discourse? How does it work in the literary context of Flaubert in general and Madame Bovary in particular? Does it translate directly into cinematic terms? If so, how has this affected film adaptations of Madame Bovary, specifically those of Jean Renoir, Vincente Minnelli, and Claude Chabrol? If not, and this constitutes the crux of this essay's thesis, is there an indirect filmic substitute that can generate equivalent stylistic effects? The short answer to the last question is yes, and it lies, as we shall see, in film's ability to foreground the body's performative ability to express inner states as an outward form of affect or gest. First, let us clear some semantic ground and try to establish a terminological consensus via some specific definitions. In A Dictionary of Narratology, Gerald Prince defines "direct discourse...

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewRuth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel. Ruth Bernard Yeazell . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xx+252.Francis-Noël ThomasFrancis-Noël ThomasTruman College Search for more articles by this author Truman CollegePDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore “Dutch painting,” Ruth Bernard Yeazell says, explaining her subtitle, “became [in the nineteenth century] a kind of shorthand for many of the characteristics we now associate with the bourgeois novel” (xv). She reminds us that nineteenth-century critics used this shorthand widely. The first one she cites is Walter Scott reviewing Jane Austen's Emma (1815).1 She recalls that the novelists themselves used the same shorthand and sometimes even called their writing “painting.” Her chapter on Thomas Hardy, for example, pointedly calls attention to the subtitle of his second published novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872): “A Rural Painting of the Dutch School.” What did this mean to Hardy? Why did writers of realist novels want to associate their work with painting, and why “Dutch painting”?This book, then, takes the connection between Dutch painting—painting in the seventeenth-century Protestant Dutch Republic—and realist fiction seriously and sets out both to explore a fascinating terrain and to answer some specific questions. “What did the art of the Dutch Golden Age mean to the nineteenth century, and what was at stake when critics invoked its precedent…to justify or attack the realistic fiction of their day? Why should the novelists themselves have been drawn to seventeenth-century Dutch art, and why nonetheless did Dutch painting in fiction remain a source of deep ambivalence even to those who most obviously looked to Dutch painting for a model?” (xv).Realistic fiction is represented here by four novelists—Balzac, George Eliot, Hardy, and Proust—who are examined in successive chapters. Yeazell recalls links between them and regards Proust as a sort of culmination of what the first three achieved in “Dutch painting.” Although she does not explain how she came to settle on these four writers, the choice may have been partly guided by the ease of connecting these writers to Dutch painting and even to specific Dutch paintings. George Eliot and Hardy directly claim the association, at least in some of their early work. Balzac, famous for his striking evocation of setting, was compared to the painters from the outset and either admired for or admonished for “painting.” Proust, in the famous scene of Bergotte's death, brings his invented writer face-to-face with a real painting, Vermeer's View of Delft (1659–60). There the dying writer discovers how he ought to have written. “There is little question,” Yeazell says, “that Proust identified his own art with the ideal to which Bergotte belatedly aspires” (186).Yeazell says that she is addressing “a problem in the history of taste” (xv), and in the course of her discussion she provides historical documentation. She is careful to remind us that nineteenth-century critics and novelists had conceptions of seventeenth-century Dutch painting that are, in some ways, quite different from our own, partly because the range of such painting readily accessible to us was not readily accessible to them. Which paintings did they see? Which ones did they make use of in their writing? She makes a conscientious effort to supply precise answers.She deals with the question of what seventeenth-century Dutch painting meant to the nineteenth century largely by offering two fundamentally opposed views: Ruskin's admittedly eccentric, extravagant, and not especially well-informed excoriation of the whole school; and the encomiums of the exiled French radical democrat Théophile Thoré, who, as one prominent art historian has put it, “viewed politics and art criticism as part of a single whole.”2 Thoré is sometimes credited with rediscovering Vermeer, although he merely made Vermeer—who, as Yeazell notes “ had never been entirely lost” (189)—known to a wide international public for the first time even as he “interpolated into Vermeer's œuvre the works of other painters…[resulting in] a most contradictory image of the painter's style.”3 Thoré, does not, any more than Ruskin, look at Dutch painting with a discriminating eye.Even George Eliot and Proust, both of whom admired Ruskin, dismissed what he had to say about Dutch painting. Proust benefited from what Thoré had written inasmuch as Thoré was instrumental in making Vermeer widely known in France in the mid-nineteenth century—by the time Proust wrote Du côté du chez Swann (1913), Vermeer's name could serve as an emblem of superior taste—but Thoré's praise of Dutch painting for being the product of a society that had liberated the interpretation of human life from the constraints of Christianity and paganism alike certainly had no influence on Balzac, Eliot, or Hardy.Perhaps the contrasting eccentric views of Ruskin and Thoré have such prominence in Art of the Everyday because it is a ruling assumption in this study that “‘Dutch painting’ in fiction [remained] a source of deep ambivalence even to those who most obviously looked to painting for a model” (xv). Yeazell says she will address the question of why this should be so, but I have missed any convincing answer. This deep ambivalence is not mentioned in her treatment of Proust, and the claim itself is not so evident that it can be assumed without argument.That all of the writers she examines in detail have explicit connections with Dutch painting may account for Flaubert's not being among them. Still, Flaubert was said in Sainte-Beuve's famous review of Madame Bovary (1856) to have painted Flemish and Dutch genre scenes, and the author of Madame Bovary is, perhaps even more than Proust, an inventive and ingenious student of these models however he came to know them.Even if there is no one seventeenth-century Dutch painting that can serve as a source for the following passage from Madame Bovary in which “nothing happens,” anyone who has seen paintings of elegant seventeenth-century Dutch “ladies” writing letters or sitting at a writing table will be able to recognize that Flaubert has integrated this familiar subject of Dutch “genre painting” into his novel. He put into this image what lies at the heart of his narrative, Emma Bovary's naïve ambitions and her hopelessly ineffective attempts to fulfill them:Elle portait une robe de chambre tout ouverte, qui laissait voir, entre les revers à châle du corsage, une chemisette plissée avec trois boutons d'or. Sa ceinture était une cordelière à gros glands, et ses petites pantoufles de couleur grenat avaient une touffe de rubans larges, qui s'étalait sur le cou-de-pied. Elle s'était acheté un buvard, une papeterie, un porte-plume et des enveloppes, quoiqu'elle n'eût personne à qui écrire; elle époussetait son étagère, se regardait dans la glace, prenait un livre, puis, rêvant entre les lignes, le laissait tomber sur ses genoux. Elle avait envie de faire des voyages ou de retourner vivre à son couvent. Elle souhaitait à la fois mourir et habiter Paris.4If there is deep ambivalence here, it is not in the novelist. There is no conflict between the movement of narrative and the stasis of painting. This is an example of the way a conflation of images ultimately derived from the tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting was put to ingenious use in a landmark of nineteenth-century realistic fiction. It does not support the claim that “Dutch realism in the novel is a realism of the past” (162).Over sixty years ago, Erich Auerbach, taking another passage from Madame Bovary, offered what has become a classic analysis of “pictures” in realistic fiction.5 Yeazell does not discuss Flaubert's inventive use of “painting”; she does not mention Auerbach. Art of the Everyday is a serious and welcome book (handsomely produced too) that would have been better had it offered a wider consideration of the ways that painting entered the fabric of realistic fiction and had it been less assured about “deep ambivalence” in the novelists who “painted.” Notes 1Scott's unsigned article appeared in Quarterly Review 14, which is dated October 1815 but was not issued until March 1816. Emma is dated 1816 on its title page but was published in December 1815. Scott does not use the term “Dutch painting” but refers to “the Flemish school of painting” (1). Yeazell notes that “nineteenth-century writers did not often distinguish closely between the Dutch and the Flemish in this connection” (1). Théophile Thoré, with characteristic vigor, complained that French critics confused the Dutch with the Flemish: “Il y a là une hérésie historique et artistique à la fois, un inexplicable oubli de l'histoire, une perversion de la géographie, une vue tout à fait fausse de l'art lui-même” (There is here a heresy at once historical and artistic, an inexplicable forgetting of history, a perversion of geography, a view altogether false of art itself) (Musées de la Hollande, vol. 1, Amsterdam et La Haye: Études sur l'école hollandaise [Paris: Renouard, 1858], 320, my translation). These terms can still cause confusion, as can others such as the Netherlands, Flanders, Holland, and the Dutch Republic. Consider the place names in this sentence: “From Reynolds's journey to Holland and Flanders in 1781 until Marcel Proust's visit to the Netherlands in 1902, travel made possible other resonant encounters with Dutch painting” (xvi). A note distinguishing these terms would have been useful.2Albert Blankert, Vermeer of Delft (Oxford: Phaidon, 1978), 67–68.3Ibid., 69.4“She wore a dressing gown, completely open, showing between the lapels a pleated blouse with three gold buttons. Her belt was a cord with large tassels, and her little slippers the color of garnet had a tuft of wide ribbon that spread over the instep. She had bought herself a blotter, a writing case, a pen holder, and some envelopes, although she had no one to write to; she dusted her shelves, looked at herself in the mirror, took up a book, then, dreaming between the lines, let it fall into her lap. She wanted to travel or to go back to live in her convent. She wanted at once both to die and to live in Paris” (Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary [Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966], 94, my translation).5Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der Abendländischen Literatur (Bern: Fischer-Verlag, 1946). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 2November 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/655421 Views: 314Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

In this paper, attention is paid to the narrative techniques used by Gustave Flaubert in constituting his most famous work, “Madame Bovary”. In the novel, Flaubert applied almost all narrative strategies that characterize his novelistic art. Through the character of the heroine Emma Bovary, the author points to a number of modulations in the narrative, which distinguish Flaubert as the original author, ready to surprising twists in which his art of varying different storytelling methods triumphs. Finally, the conclusion of the paper is that “Madame Bovary” is not only latent author’s “self”, but actually a “self” of every individual, crucified between reality and the irrational, which reflects Flaubert’s novelistic skills that make him a distinctive and authentic literary creator.

Reviewed by: Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from “Madame Bovary” to “Lolita” Gregg Mayer (bio) Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from “Madame Bovary” to “Lolita,” by Elisabeth Ladenson. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. 272 pp. $17.95. Dirt for Art’s Sake, a title conspicuously playing on the famous “dirt for dirt’s sake” in Judge John M. Woolsey’s opinion regarding Ulysses,1 offers an engaging history of literary censorship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Writing with a plain style and a touch of humor, Elisabeth Ladenson embarks on a wonderful exploration of how books (and movies) travel from literary obscenity to undisputed classics, her analysis never losing sight of the senseless repetition of the journey.2 [End Page 372] Not surprisingly, James Joyce and Ulysses are a central part of the analysis. Ladenson is an associate professor of French and comparative literature at Columbia University. With a comparativist’s eye, she traces what she defines as two lines of defense to a charge of obscenity: (1) art for art’s sake, elevating art above the chains of societal censorship, and (2) realism, an understanding that art must engage every aspect of life, even at its crudest. Ladenson begins with Gustave Flaubert, including a keen discussion of the 1949 film version of Madame Bovary that collided with the Motion Picture Production Code, requiring departures from Flaubert’s text, and even an actress change so as not to be “too sexy” (39). Ladenson moves through Charles Baudelaire and “The Flowers of Evil” (47), Joyce, Radclyffe Hall, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolitigation” (187). Other authors considered include the Marquis de Sade and John Cleland. As is well known, Ulysses first appeared in the United States in March 1918 in the Little Review (91).3 Publication stopped after the thirteenth episode in 1920 because of an obscenity suit. The Little Review’s editors lost their case and could not continue publishing, and Ulysses was an illegal novel when it was published in full in 1922, an act that ultimately reinvigorated the national censorship debate.4 In 1933, Woolsey issued his hallmark opinion, famously opining that the book is “somewhat emetic, [but] nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac” (185). Because of the difficulty in reading Ulysses, Ladenson reminds us, it is “the most unlikely of dirty books” (80). Further complicating the matter is the law’s inability successfully to grapple with obscenity: “An assignment of what art is cannot be comprehended in a judicial sense, although attempts have been made historically to define the concepts of what art is not. . . . [Obscenity statutes] can lead to slicing up areas of creativity based upon the slimmest of emotional causes.”5 Ladenson identifies through Ulysses the separation between “dirty” words used in a sexual sense and “dirty” words that are simply vulgar without sexual overtones: Literary “dirt” is in fact a twofold category, referring alternatively—and often simultaneously—to the “four-letter words” that took on great importance in the trials of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer, for instance, and to the depictions of sexuality that were no less at issue in those same trials. The persistent metaphors of “dirt” and “filth” as well as related terms such as “sewage” to refer to sex in literature and art, all of which were deployed unsparingly when Ulysses was first published, are, moreover, ample testimony to the degree to which eroticism and excretion are conflated not just for the Leopold Blooms of fiction but for their would-be censors as well. In works such as Lawrence’s and Miller’s, as in Ulysses, the use of vulgar terms is for the most part [End Page 373] inseparable from the representations of sexual situations they accompany. (89) Grappling with this troubling conflation further muddies the scope (at least as it is relatively defined) of obscenity. Censorship today seems unlikely to reach the breadth sought at the time of Ulysses,6 but one painful observation in Ladenson’s book refers to the recurrence of foolish censorship prosecutions. The most illustrative case may be her discussion of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, a book subjected...

These essays, three of which are in English and the remainder in French, derive from a collaborative project involving scholars from the USA and France. As the subtitles indicate between them, the authors are concerned to compare works across periods, cultures, and genres. The partial exception is David Spieser-Landes’s nonetheless informative presentation of the politics of dialogism in the contemporary regional literature of Alsace. The ‘classical’ texts (in one case a film) span a period from 1559 to 1959. The earliest of the contemporary texts is Abdoulaye Sadji’s novel Nini (1954). Six of the essays are each the work of two scholars in collaboration, though speaking with one voice rather than embodying a secondary exploitation of dialogism. In her short Introduction, Oana Panaïté helpfully differentiates the contributors’ underlying approach from that of Bakhtin. The collective enterprise raises many questions in relation to methodology, but discussion of method is not allowed to overwhelm the readings themselves. The contributors’ background in francophone literature is evident throughout. It is in especially sharp focus in Lynn Palermo and Gladys Francis’s positing of a dialogue between André Breton’s Martinique, charmeuse de serpents and Gerty Dambury’s novel set in Guadeloupe, Les Rétifs. Alison Rice and Olivier Morel’s essay, notwithstanding their recourse to Michel de Certeau’s notion of déplacement, is less revelatory regarding Zola’s ‘J’accuse!’ than on Alain Mabanckou’s rewriting of it in his novel Verre cassé. Vera Klekovkina reads back into Baudelaire’s ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ a foreshadowing of the warning in Amélie Nothomb’s Le Voyage d’hiver about fantasies of domination, but it is the contemporary work that is her main focus. The same may be said of the comparison by Margaret Gray and Jason Herbeck of passages from Proust’s Combray and Édouard Glissant’s novel La Lézarde. Vlad Dima’s consideration of Les 400 Coups and Ousmane Sembène’s film Xala as examples of meta-cinema is particularly revealing on Sembène, but his authoritative presentation of Truffaut’s theory and practice has its own value. Anne-Marie Petitjean keeps L’Heptaméron and Anne Hébert’s L’Île de la demoiselle continually in play and is perceptive about Marguerite’s sixty-seventh story. Laurent Loty and Véronique Tacquin give equal prominence to both their questions: ‘Kourouma, un Voltaire africain?’ and ‘Voltaire, un Kourouma européen?’, and argue convincingly that Candide has been widely misinterpreted. Flavien Falantin’s elegant discussion of bêtise in Madame Bovary and Sadji’s Nini gives a new complexion to Flaubert’s presentation of Emma. Dominique Licops and Paul Breslin’s lively comparison of The Tempest and Césaire’s Une tempête should commend itself to students of both writers. The complementary expertise of Hall Bjørnstad and Oana Panaïté leads to a powerful consideration of Marie NDiaye and Pascal that is an exemplary justification of the project as a whole and casts fresh light on the celebrated evocation of man as ‘un roseau (pensant)’. Any initial worry that this volume might be a factitious enterprise is quickly dispelled by these innovative essays, all of which have the potential to stimulate considerable further dialogue.

MAGGIE is a tease. For decades now, literary historians and LYE.. Crane scholars have attempted to ascertain the sources of this painful rendering of late nineteenth-century Bowery slum life, but the results have been far from conclusive. One school of Maggie source-hunters has assumed the literary approach, arguing that Crane drew his inspiration from Flaubert's Madame Bovary, from Zola's L'Assommoir, from such contemporary works as the Rev. Thomas DeWitt Talmage's Night Sides of City Life, or even from Kipling's Light That Failed.' There is some basis for all of these suggestions; but the fact remains that Crane was unusually ill-read,2 and any attempt to proffer a specific literary text as the source of the content or technique of any Crane work must take this into account. This caveat is especially prominent in the commentaries of the other school of Maggie source-hunters, those who assume the painterly approach. Drawing upon the incontrovertible facts that Crane's sister Mary Helen was a practicing artist and art instructor; that one of Crane's early loves (approximately i 888 to I 892) was Phebe English, a professional painter; that Crane lived in the studios of several New York illustrators in the i 8gos; and that several of his writings-including Third Violet, The Silver Pageant, and

This article explores the realist novel's reliance on the discourse of travel developed in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the discourse that authorized self-styled travelers over against the vulgar and proliferating tourists. Taking Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary as a case study, the article shows how the novel structures itself around the sets of oppositions travel discourse employed, most notably that of stasis and mobility, or dwelling and traveling. The fictional narrator strives for authority over against a set of characters differently figured as fixed in place or in entrenched mentalities, and Flaubert's masterful use of free indirect style becomes the narrator's means of establishing that authority through the demonstration of unparalleled mental mobility the technique affords.

Psychology, as both a discipline and a mode of understanding the human experience, has evolved significantly across time and cultures. Literature has been a crucial medium in reflecting and shaping psychological thought, offering profound insights into the human mind, social behaviours, and mental health. By analysing a classical, modern, and postmodern novel – Madame Bovary (1856) by Gustave Flaubert, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf, and American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis – one can trace the evolution of psychological practice as depicted in literature and understand its intersections with societal transformations.