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This thesis examines the sociolegal context of the representation of infidelity in the Anglo-American novel. It locates the first serious Anglo-American treatment of infidelity in the novels of Henry James and Ford Madox Ford; and it situates these writers for the first time in their immediate legal context. The dominant mode through which infidelity was discursively defined during this period was simultaneously legal and sensational: the publication of "Divorce Court" trials in the daily newspapers. The implication of this context for the novel is twofold. The focus on narration from the perspective of the betrayed party prompts a local questioning of knowledge (of knowing one's spouse), and a more general questioning of the epistemoloigcal premises of the realist novel itself. The novels considered here make clear the limitations of a legal discourse committed to a disinterested record of "what happened." In the process, they illustrate several of the narrative innovations most distinctive to the modernist novel. Secondly, what will be called an "aesthetics of suspicion" and "domestic surveillance" distinguishes James's and Ford's novels from the central critical tradition which reads the representation of infidelity as subversive of social norms. Instead, these novels reinforce, thematically and formally, the legal policing of infidelity. Doubt of both conjugal and narrative fidelity, then, becomes the means through which the legal policing of infidelity in the divorce court is covertly extended in the novel.

This thesis takes up J. G. Ballard's contention, that 'the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else,' to show that Don DeLillo uses a particular sexual, cultural economy of adultery, understood in its many loaded cultural and literary contexts, as a model for semantic reproduction. I contend that DeLillo's fiction evinces a promiscuous model of language that structurally reflects the myth of the adulterous triangle. The thesis makes a significant intervention into DeLillo scholarship by challenging Paul Maltby's suggestion that DeLillo's linguistic model is Romantic and pure. My analysis of the narrative operations of adultery in his work reveals the alternative promiscuous model. I discuss ten DeLillo novels and one play - Americana, Players, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II,Underworld, the play Valparaiso, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and the pseudonymousAmazons - that feature adultery narratives. I demonstrate that these narratives resist conservative models of language, space, and sex by using promiscuity as a method of narrative control. I argue that DeLillo's adultery narratives respond subversively to attempts to categorise his work, and that he extends the mythologised rhetoric of the adulterous triangle by adopting sexual transgression as a three-sided semantic structure that connects language, sex, and space. I refer to theories of narrative, postmodernity, space, desire, and parody to show that DeLillo's adultery narratives structurally influence his experiments with linguistic meaning. My analysis reveals that contradiction performs at several spatial, sexual, and dialogical levels to undermine readings that suggest DeLillo's language models pure meaning. I identify the sexualised fissure within DeLillo's semantic style that is exposed by the operation of contradiction. I believe this gap distinguishes DeLillo from postmodern fiction's emphasis on the placeless, because it is a meaningful space that emphasises the reproductive adulteration of signification. I expose several sites of dialectic rupture, including the hotel/motel room, oppositional and metaphorical description, the journey, the image, and the secret. I contend that sex in these transgressive narratives is a model for something else: promiscuous meaning. This thesis demonstrates that DeLillo's fiction charts the typography of the mythical third side of the adulterous triangle in order to respond to language's own promiscuity.

Thesis (B.A.)--Bi-College (Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges) Comparative Literature Program, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis takes up J. G. Ballard's contention, that 'the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else,' to show that Don DeLillo uses a particular sexual, cultural economy of adultery, understood in its many loaded cultural and literary contexts, as a model for semantic reproduction. I contend that DeLillo's fiction evinces a promiscuous model of language that structurally reflects the myth of the adulterous triangle. The thesis makes a significant intervention into DeLillo scholarship by challenging Paul Maltby's suggestion that DeLillo's linguistic model is Romantic and pure. My analysis of the narrative operations of adultery in his work reveals the alternative promiscuous model. I discuss ten DeLillo novels and one play - Americana, Players, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II,Underworld, the play Valparaiso, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and the pseudonymousAmazons - that feature adultery narratives. I demonstrate that these narratives resist conservative models of language, space, and sex by using promiscuity as a method of narrative control. I argue that DeLillo's adultery narratives respond subversively to attempts to categorise his work, and that he extends the mythologised rhetoric of the adulterous triangle by adopting sexual transgression as a three-sided semantic structure that connects language, sex, and space. I refer to theories of narrative, postmodernity, space, desire, and parody to show that DeLillo's adultery narratives structurally influence his experiments with linguistic meaning. My analysis reveals that contradiction performs at several spatial, sexual, and dialogical levels to undermine readings that suggest DeLillo's language models pure meaning. I identify the sexualised fissure within DeLillo's semantic style that is exposed by the operation of contradiction. I believe this gap distinguishes DeLillo from postmodern fiction's emphasis on the placeless, because it is a meaningful space that emphasises the reproductive adulteration of signification. I expose several sites of dialectic rupture, including the hotel/motel room, oppositional and metaphorical description, the journey, the image, and the secret. I contend that sex in these transgressive narratives is a model for something else: promiscuous meaning. This thesis demonstrates that DeLillo's fiction charts the typography of the mythical third side of the adulterous triangle in order to respond to language's own promiscuity.

This thesis takes up J. G. Ballard's contention, that 'the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else,' to show that Don DeLillo uses a particular sexual, cultural economy of adultery, understood in its many loaded cultural and literary contexts, as a model for semantic reproduction. I contend that DeLillo's fiction evinces a promiscuous model of language that structurally reflects the myth of the adulterous triangle. The thesis makes a significant intervention into DeLillo scholarship by challenging Paul Maltby's suggestion that DeLillo's linguistic model is Romantic and pure. My analysis of the narrative operations of adultery in his work reveals the alternative promiscuous model. I discuss ten DeLillo novels and one play - Americana, Players, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II,Underworld, the play Valparaiso, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and the pseudonymousAmazons - that feature adultery narratives. I demonstrate that these narratives resist conservative models of language, space, and sex by using promiscuity as a method of narrative control. I argue that DeLillo's adultery narratives respond subversively to attempts to categorise his work, and that he extends the mythologised rhetoric of the adulterous triangle by adopting sexual transgression as a three-sided semantic structure that connects language, sex, and space. I refer to theories of narrative, postmodernity, space, desire, and parody to show that DeLillo's adultery narratives structurally influence his experiments with linguistic meaning. My analysis reveals that contradiction performs at several spatial, sexual, and dialogical levels to undermine readings that suggest DeLillo's language models pure meaning. I identify the sexualised fissure within DeLillo's semantic style that is exposed by the operation of contradiction. I believe this gap distinguishes DeLillo from postmodern fiction's emphasis on the placeless, because it is a meaningful space that emphasises the reproductive adulteration of signification. I expose several sites of dialectic rupture, including the hotel/motel room, oppositional and metaphorical description, the journey, the image, and the secret. I contend that sex in these transgressive narratives is a model for something else: promiscuous meaning. This thesis demonstrates that DeLillo's fiction charts the typography of the mythical third side of the adulterous triangle in order to respond to language's own promiscuity.

This thesis takes up J. G. Ballard's contention, that 'the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else,' to show that Don DeLillo uses a particular sexual, cultural economy of adultery, understood in its many loaded cultural and literary contexts, as a model for semantic reproduction. I contend that DeLillo's fiction evinces a promiscuous model of language that structurally reflects the myth of the adulterous triangle. The thesis makes a significant intervention into DeLillo scholarship by challenging Paul Maltby's suggestion that DeLillo's linguistic model is Romantic and pure. My analysis of the narrative operations of adultery in his work reveals the alternative promiscuous model. I discuss ten DeLillo novels and one play - Americana, Players, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II,Underworld, the play Valparaiso, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and the pseudonymousAmazons - that feature adultery narratives. I demonstrate that these narratives resist conservative models of language, space, and sex by using promiscuity as a method of narrative control. I argue that DeLillo's adultery narratives respond subversively to attempts to categorise his work, and that he extends the mythologised rhetoric of the adulterous triangle by adopting sexual transgression as a three-sided semantic structure that connects language, sex, and space. I refer to theories of narrative, postmodernity, space, desire, and parody to show that DeLillo's adultery narratives structurally influence his experiments with linguistic meaning. My analysis reveals that contradiction performs at several spatial, sexual, and dialogical levels to undermine readings that suggest DeLillo's language models pure meaning. I identify the sexualised fissure within DeLillo's semantic style that is exposed by the operation of contradiction. I believe this gap distinguishes DeLillo from postmodern fiction's emphasis on the placeless, because it is a meaningful space that emphasises the reproductive adulteration of signification. I expose several sites of dialectic rupture, including the hotel/motel room, oppositional and metaphorical description, the journey, the image, and the secret. I contend that sex in these transgressive narratives is a model for something else: promiscuous meaning. This thesis demonstrates that DeLillo's fiction charts the typography of the mythical third side of the adulterous triangle in order to respond to language's own promiscuity.

This thesis takes up J. G. Ballard's contention, that 'the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else,' to show that Don DeLillo uses a particular sexual, cultural economy of adultery, understood in its many loaded cultural and literary contexts, as a model for semantic reproduction. I contend that DeLillo's fiction evinces a promiscuous model of language that structurally reflects the myth of the adulterous triangle. The thesis makes a significant intervention into DeLillo scholarship by challenging Paul Maltby's suggestion that DeLillo's linguistic model is Romantic and pure. My analysis of the narrative operations of adultery in his work reveals the alternative promiscuous model. I discuss ten DeLillo novels and one play - Americana, Players, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II,Underworld, the play Valparaiso, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and the pseudonymousAmazons - that feature adultery narratives. I demonstrate that these narratives resist conservative models of language, space, and sex by using promiscuity as a method of narrative control. I argue that DeLillo's adultery narratives respond subversively to attempts to categorise his work, and that he extends the mythologised rhetoric of the adulterous triangle by adopting sexual transgression as a three-sided semantic structure that connects language, sex, and space. I refer to theories of narrative, postmodernity, space, desire, and parody to show that DeLillo's adultery narratives structurally influence his experiments with linguistic meaning. My analysis reveals that contradiction performs at several spatial, sexual, and dialogical levels to undermine readings that suggest DeLillo's language models pure meaning. I identify the sexualised fissure within DeLillo's semantic style that is exposed by the operation of contradiction. I believe this gap distinguishes DeLillo from postmodern fiction's emphasis on the placeless, because it is a meaningful space that emphasises the reproductive adulteration of signification. I expose several sites of dialectic rupture, including the hotel/motel room, oppositional and metaphorical description, the journey, the image, and the secret. I contend that sex in these transgressive narratives is a model for something else: promiscuous meaning. This thesis demonstrates that DeLillo's fiction charts the typography of the mythical third side of the adulterous triangle in order to respond to language's own promiscuity.

This thesis examines literary images of masculinity and femininity, their function and depiction in marriage roles and homo-social relationships in the context of crisis: wifely adultery. The study is heavily reliant upon vernacular texts, especially Old French works from the twelfth and thirteenth century including works from the genres of romance, lais, fables, and fabliaux. Latin works including historia and prescriptive texts such as customaries, penitentials, etiquette texts and medical and canon law treatises are also used to contextualise themes in the Old French literature. The introduction summarises modern literary and historical criticism concerning sexuality in the Middle Ages. It then discusses the influences of the Church, philosophy, medicine, natural theory and society on medieval definitions of sexuality to contextualise the literature which is focal to this thesis. The following four chapters each consider a single character in the adulterous affair: the adulteress, the husband, the lover and the accuser. The literary images of each character are analysed in detail revealing the diversity of depictions between and also within genres. This enables the identification of medieval sexual constructs, challenging some previous critiques of representations of sexuality in the Middle Ages. The final chapter explores the language by which the sexual act is presented. Furthermore, it shows how language is used and occasionally abused in committing, prosecuting and evading punishment for adultery and how it can be wielded as a weapon of women. Through the focus of a body of literature rich in depictions of sexuality, this thesis questions the misogynist overtones often attributed to medieval literature. The diversity of images shows that the literature illustrates a wide range of opinions and ideas reflective of the complexity of sexuality in medieval society.

Luigi Pirandello's two short stories La verita and Certi obblighi and the play derived from them Il berretto a sonagli seem to be, at least on the surface, about adultery. The three male protagonists' dilemmas come about as a result of their wives' sexual transgressions, which consequently impose certain "obligations" upon them. The themes of adultery and betrayal, however, are merely surface elements, used to explore the theatrical nature of identity and of all social experience. Specifically, the three works show how role-playing-within-roles safeguards the identity of the betrayed husbands, by protecting them from social humiliation. / Since all Pirandellian characters role-play, and as a consequence portray and assume multiple identities, this thesis examines the function and significance of this technique in both narrative and theatrical contexts. It attempts to show that while the device is a feature common to all three works, it is in the dramatic adaptation that role-playing in relation to identity acquires its more visible and effective treatment.