San Antonio College Library

"Fictions of Female Adultery, 1864-1890 begins by discussing previous attempts to theorize the novel of adultery, and by arguing for an historically-based approach through study of novels by Goethe, Rousseau and others. Three chapters on adultery fiction in eighteenth-century Britain then deal with a wide range of writers from Aphra Behn to Mary Wollstonecraft. A further two chapters on later nineteenth-century French adultery fiction focus on Zola,...

A guide to Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", offering biographical information about the author, analysis of the text, a character list, and critical excerpts.

Analyzes the plot, setting, characters, themes, and symbolism in Hawthorne's novel, and discusses the purpose of its "Custom-house" portion.

The introduction to this volume outlines the critical history of the novel from the moralising reactions of Hawthorne's contemporaries, through the assessments of writers such as Henry James and D.H. Lawrence, to the more recent approaches of the New Criticism, formalism, psychoanalytical criticism, structuralism and feminism. Each of the interpretative essays that follow places The Scarlet Letter in a specific historical and cultural context. The...

Shakespeare has been misread for centuries as having modern ideas about sex and gender. This book shows how in the Restoration and Eighteenth century, Shakespeare's plays and other Renaissance texts were adapted to make them conform to these modern ideas. Through readings of Shakespearean texts, including King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello, and other Renaissance drama, the book reveals a sexual world before heterosexuality. Shakespeare and...