Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, is part of the <A href=http://www.barnesandnoble.com/classics/index.asp?z=y&cds2Pid=16447&sLinkPrefix>Barnes & Noble Classics</A> 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:<UL type=disc><LI style=MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto class=MsoNormal>New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars <LI style=MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto class=MsoNormal>Biographies of the authors <LI style=MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto class=MsoNormal>Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events <LI style=MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto class=MsoNormal>Footnotes and endnotes <LI style=MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto class=MsoNormal>Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work <LI style=MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto class=MsoNormal>Comments by other famous authors <LI style=MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto class=MsoNormal>Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations <LI style=MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto class=MsoNormal>Bibliographies for further reading <LI style=MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto class=MsoNormal>Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences--biographical, historical, and literary--to 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.