Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks

A revelatory work that examines the intricate relationship between history and literature, truth and fiction-with some surprising conclusions.

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 ...