Product Description Through close readings of the male characters of Madame Bovary this book opens up the sociological and legal contexts of Flaubert's famous novel and its heroine in new ways. Current gender and masculinities theory is combined with attention to the 19th-century French codification of sex as defined by the Code Napoléon to frame central questions about male privilege, male roles, «successful» manhood, masculinity, and male identity formation. Throughout, the traditional and problematic literary notion of character itself is rethought within the wider generic context of how the masculine is represented in the Realist Novel. Not only does this study then offer a new approach to a well-known novel in its French context, but it also opens up a method whereby the canonical 19th-century European novelists can be reevaluated through their various treatments of the masculine. The tragedy of suppressed and unexpressed individuality so central to both Emma and Charles Bovary as defined in this study then has much to say to the «crisis in masculinity» as experienced in the late 20th-century. About the Author The Author: Mary Orr is Reader in French at the University of Exeter, but has previously held posts at The University of Wales, Swansea, Christ Church, Oxford, and the University of St. Andrews. Born in N. Ireland in 1960 she studied French and German at St. Andrews, before moving to Queens' College Cambridge to complete her Ph.D. on Claude Simon (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985), and the subject of her first book Claude Simon: the intertextual dimension (1993). Autobiography, intertextuality, national identity and gender studies form her many publications on the twentieth-century French novel and more recently Flaubert. With Tony Williams she has edited New Approaches in Flaubert Studies (Mellen, forthcoming) and she is completing a monograph on Flaubert's major novels, Flaubert: writing the masculine with OUP.