Madame Bovary on Trial

Dominick LaCapra is Professor of History and Comparative Literature Emeritus at Cornell University. He is the author or editor of many books, including History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence; History in Transit; and History and Memory after Auschwitz, all from Cornell.

It is frivolously tempting (especially so in the light of Dominick LaCapra's absorbing and provocative book) to read the trial of Madame Bovary as an ironic Flaubertian text. But of course the trial was real enough, for in 1857 Flaubert was charged with outrage to public morality. In his elucidation of how the novel confronted its own trial, LaCapra addresses issues which are of central concern to modern literary theory.- Brian Nelson (Nineteenth-Century French Studies)