© 1997

Scarlet Letters

Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s


Table of contents

  1. Front Matter
    Pages i-xi
  2. Introduction: The Present State of Affairs

    1. Nicholas White
      Pages 1-10
  3. Before Modernity

  4. The High Age of Adultery: Contexts

    1. Front Matter
      Pages 83-83
    2. Jo Labanyi
      Pages 98-108
    3. Naomi Segal
      Pages 109-122
    4. Nicholas White
      Pages 123-133
  5. The High Age of Adultery: Texts

  6. Films and Fictions

    1. Front Matter
      Pages 187-187

About this book


Scarlet Letters explores the fascination exerted by adultery throughout the long history of western cultures. Critics from the UK, USA and Australia, working in a variety of specialisms, have contributed to this substantial new collection of close readings and wider contextualisations. As well as focusing on the bourgeois nineteenth century as the high age of representations of adultery, the book offers historicist and psychoanalytic analyses of texts ranging from the Amphitryon myth to Fatal Attraction and The Piano .


Analyse Close reading identity novel USA

Authors and affiliations

  1. 1.Department of FrenchRoyal Holloway, University of LondonUK
  2. 2.Department of French StudiesUniversity of ReadingUK

Bibliographic information