There were sidebar buttons, so that if you didn't know what Crime and Punishment was, or the Theory of Relativity, or the Trail of Tears, or Madame Bovary, or the Hundred Years' War, or The Flight into Egypt, you could double-click and get an illustrated rundown, in two choices: R for children, PON for Profanity, Obscenity, and Nudity.
(source) Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 2003
Madame Bovary = Gustave Flaubert's novel of a woman seeking escape from a middle class life; still regarded by many as one of the greatest novels ever written (1857)
I'm reading Madame Bovary in French now, grievously, very grievously.
(source) Christina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban, 1992
The novel which he esteemed above all others, he said, was Madame Bovary, not alone because of its formal perfection but because of the resolution of the suicide motif; Emma's death by self-poisoning seeming to be so beautifully inevitable as to become one of the supreme emblems, in Western literature, of the human condition.
(source) William Styron, Sophie's Choice, 1976
Thus, though we do not know what Shakespeare went through when he wrote LEAR, we do know what Carlyle went through when he wrote the FRENCH REVOLUTION; what Flaubert went through when he wrote MADAME BOVARY; what Keats was going through when he tried to write poetry against the coming death and the indifference of the world.
(source) Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1928
Hayward talked of Richard Feverel and Madame Bovary, of Verlaine, Dante, and Matthew Arnold.
(source) W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, 1915
In Madame Bovary, Emma represents the romantic who this realistic novel discredits.
