Madame Bovary, by
Gustave Flaubert,
is part of the
Barnes & Noble Classics series,
which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student
and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful
design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the
remarkable features of
Barnes & Noble Classics:
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to
superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical
interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a
constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and
literaryto enrich each reader''s understanding of these enduring
works.
The publication in 1857 of Madame Bovary, with its
vivid depictions of sex and adultery, incited a backlash of
immorality charges. The novel tells the story of Emma Bovary, a
doctor's wife bored and unfulfilled by marriage and motherhood. She
embarks upon a series of affairs in search of passion and
excitement, but is unable to achieve the splendid life for which
she yearns. Instead, she finds herself trapped in a downward spiral
that inexorably leads to ruin and self-destruction.
Along with Tolstoy's Anna Karenina,
Flaubert's tragic novel stands as a brilliant
portrayal of infidelity, an incisive psychological portrait of a
woman torn between duty and desire. Written with acute attention to
telling detail, Madame Bovary not only exposes the
emptiness of one woman's bourgeois existence and failure to fill
that void with fantasies, sex, and material objects. Emma's thirst
for life mirrors the universal human impulse for idealized
fulfillment.
Chris Kraus is the author of the novels I
Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, and Torpor, and a
collection of essays, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the
Triumph of Nothingness. She is co-editor, with Sylvere
Lotringer and Hedi El Kholti, of the independent press
Semiotext(e). She teaches in the graduate program of the San
Francisco Art Institute.
