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 14
... taken lines , she vaguely senses the extent to which Charles has catalyzed her tragedy and goes so far as to think that her husband is to blame for all of her troubles . As always happens in these cases , Emma has forgotten that when ...
... taken lines , she vaguely senses the extent to which Charles has catalyzed her tragedy and goes so far as to think that her husband is to blame for all of her troubles . As always happens in these cases , Emma has forgotten that when ...
Page 21
... taken as an insult by her , just as his self - assuredness is taken as a sign of ingratitude . The sense of impotence that Emma surely feels whenever she attempts to seduce her husband may well , besides hurting her , cause her to doubt ...
... taken as an insult by her , just as his self - assuredness is taken as a sign of ingratitude . The sense of impotence that Emma surely feels whenever she attempts to seduce her husband may well , besides hurting her , cause her to doubt ...
Page 55
... taken from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet : " Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel . " The second volume of Flaubert's Oeuvres complètes , published by Editions du Seuil , has as an epigraph an intuitive remark taken from the ...
... taken from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet : " Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel . " The second volume of Flaubert's Oeuvres complètes , published by Editions du Seuil , has as an epigraph an intuitive remark taken from the ...
Contents
A Wholly Fictitious Story | 54 |
An Essay on King Lear | 81 |
The Barbarous Scythian | 106 |
Copyright | |
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