Taking as its starting-point Denis de Rougemont's famous observation that 'Happy love has no story', Scarlet Letters explores the fascination exerted by the adultery motif throughout the long history of western cultures.

Critics from the UK, USA and Australia, working in a variety of specialisms, have contributed to this substantial new collection which offers a number of close readings of key texts as well as wider contextualisations of this obsessive concern with the narrative potential of triangular patterns.

In addition to focusing on the bourgeois nineteenth century as the high age of representations of adultery, the book offers historicist and psychoanalytic analyses of texts which range in geographical terms from Tolstoy to Hitchcock and in historical terms from the Amphitryon myth to contemporary films such as Fatal Attraction and The Piano.