Women's adultery provides many of the plots that run through nineteenth-century European fiction. This book discusses how novels of adultery have been theorized, argues its own theoretical perspective, and analyzes two 'circumtexts' of the fiction of female adultery: its pre-history in eighteenth-century Britain, and its decline during the Naturalist period in France. It is the first dedicated study of the theory of the novel of adultery, and of the representation of adultery in earlier British and later nineteenth-century French fiction.

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BILL OVERTON is Reader in Literature at Loughborough University. His most recent publications include The Novel of Female Adultery: Love and Gender in Continental European Fiction and A Letter to My Love: Love Poems by Women First Published in the Barbados Gazette, 1731-1737 . He has also written articles and reviews in journals including Critical Quarterly, Modern Language Review and Women's Writing .

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Preface Acknowledgements Literary Chronology Editions Used and References PART I: THOERIES Theorizing the Novel of Female Adultery Tony Tanner: Adultery and the Novel Children and Childlessness in the Novel of Female Adultery PART II: CIRCUMTEXTS Adultery in Early British Fiction Ideology of Femininity and Criminal Conversion: 1728-71 Adultery, Revolution, and Reaction: 1773-1814 After Madame Bovary : Female Adultery in Zola Parody, Entropy, Eclipse: Huysmans, Céard, Maupassant Notes Bibliography Index Notes Bibliography Index