ENGL 261
Adultery in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Last Offered Fall 2008
Division I Writing Skills
Cross-listed ENGL 261 / COMP 259 / WGST 259
This course is not offered in the current catalog or this is a previous listing for a current course.

In this tutorial, we will read five novels written between 1850 and 1899, all of which focus on the figure of the adulteress: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873-77), Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1894), and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). For each week of class, students will read one of these primary texts, as well as a selection of secondary literature that will allow us to understand, over the course of the semester, how and why the adulteress played a key role in the cultural imagination of Europe and the United States during this time. All works not originally written in English will be read in English translation.