The King & the Adulteress: A Psychoanalytical and Literary Reinterpretation of Madame Bovary and King LearDuke University Press, 1998 - 162 pages The King and the Adulteress brings together two essays that propose radically revisionary readings of two of the most important literary works in the Western canon, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Shakespeare's King Lear. In offering a new understanding of a deeply sadomasochistic relationship and of an authoritarian pathology, renowned psychoanalyst Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca combines psychoanalysis with literary studies to challenge the conventional judgments of readers and the stereotyped interpretations of literary critics to these masterpieces. Approaching the characters in Bovary and Lear from both an analytic and a critical viewpoint, Speziale-Bagliacca reinterprets many issues and events that involve archetypal figures of modern literary mythology. In fact, he reverses much of the received opinion about them. Charles Bovary, for example, far from being a victim of his wife's neurotic restlessness or the epitome of a passive imbecile, is a masochist of the highest order who makes a decisive contribution to Emma's miserable end. Lear, rather than a tragedy involving the sweet Cordelia, noble Kent, and the Fool as good and loyal supporters of an old king driven to madness by his overbearing evil daughters, is precisely the opposite. The sympathetic understanding of the reader should go, Speziale-Bagliacca suggests, also to Regan, Goneril, and Edmund, while the king, whose crisis is interpreted in the light of psychoanalytic findings on depression, finally becomes the true unbeloved "bastard" of the play. Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca is a psychoanalyst and Professor of Psychotherapy at the Medical School of the University of Genoa. He is the author of On the Shoulders of Freud and many other works. |
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Page 2
... means of carefully selected epi- sodes , Flaubert narrates a sizable part of Charles's life , beginning with his by no means easy childhood . Only for him are we given such a detailed case history . In the case of Emma , Flaubert limits ...
... means of carefully selected epi- sodes , Flaubert narrates a sizable part of Charles's life , beginning with his by no means easy childhood . Only for him are we given such a detailed case history . In the case of Emma , Flaubert limits ...
Page 115
... mean , Look more carefully and let me go on being the only target at which you aim ( in the world of archery " blank ” can also mean " bull's eye " ) , or else Kent is offering himself as sole friend and adviser to the sovereign : Let ...
... mean , Look more carefully and let me go on being the only target at which you aim ( in the world of archery " blank ” can also mean " bull's eye " ) , or else Kent is offering himself as sole friend and adviser to the sovereign : Let ...
Page 131
... means ; indeed , perhaps there were no better means in that particular situation . What must be kept clearly in mind is the culture of that period ( along with its dangerous sub- species , public opinion ) and , more important still ...
... means ; indeed , perhaps there were no better means in that particular situation . What must be kept clearly in mind is the culture of that period ( along with its dangerous sub- species , public opinion ) and , more important still ...
Contents
A Wholly Fictitious Story | 54 |
An Essay on King Lear | 81 |
The Barbarous Scythian | 106 |
Copyright | |
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