.... They often took what they read in novels like La dame aux camélias and Immensee to be principles of love in real life, and some even followed the life paths of the protagonists. This phenomenon can be best subsumed under the term Bovarysm , defined by Jules de Gaultier as “the human ability to conceive...

... such a patchwork together. More signifi- cantly, such a beginning can be shown to be structurally sound: we situate Emma through it. “Charles-bovarysme” enables us to under- stznd “Emma-bovarysme.” What is “Emma-bovarysme”? To answer this we must look at Emma not through Henry James’s eyes...

... on the “desolating clarity” of Shakespeare’s pres- entation of an essential element of bovarysme in the two chief charac- ters, and he concludes: “The sensibility deployed here, for all its gener- osity of gesture, is narrower than what we find in King Lear. It is not that Shakespeare has ceased to see...