Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks

by Peter Gay

Book Overview

Focusing on three literary masterpieces-Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901)-Peter Gay, a leading cultural historian, demonstrates that there is more than one way to read a novel. Typically, readers believe that fiction, especially the Realist novels that dominated Western culture for most of the nineteenth century and beyond, is based on historical truth and that great...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393051188
• ISBN13: 9780393051186
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Short, Witty Second Glance at Ninteenth Century Literature

Peter Gay has taken three lectures and turned them into Savage Reprisals. Each of these essays looks at a different novel from the realist genre of the nineteenth century from three different countries; Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks. The essays are connected by the Peter Gay's examination of the usefulness of these books to historians and by the authors of these novels' anger against their society and the revenge they take against it within their novels. It is easy to see how these essays were brought to life as lectures but they work quite effectively as written works as well. This book will even be of interest to those who have not read the particular novels in question. The epilogue is the crowning achievment of the book and well worth the price of admission. A short, quick, fun spin through the world of novelists, historians and the nineteenth century.