The flirt's tragedy
Subtitle: desire without end in Victorian and Edwardian fiction
By: Richard A. Kaye.
Publisher: University Press of Virginia
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Charlottesville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 246
Subjects: Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882 -- Influence.; English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Courtship in literature.; English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Women and literature -- English-speaking countries.; American fiction -- History and criticism.; Man-woman relationships in literature.; Mate selection in literature.; Seduction in literature.; Desire in literature.; Women in literature.; Sex in literature.
Description: "In the flirtation plots of novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and W. M. Thackeray, heroines learn sociability through competition with naughty coquette-doubles. In the writing of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, flirting harbors potentially tragic consequences, a perilous game then adapted by male flirts in the novels of Oscar Wilde and Henry James.

In revising Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education in The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton critiques the nineteenth-century European novel as morbidly obsessed with deferred desires. Finally, in works by D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster, flirtation comes to reshape the modernist representation of homoerotic relations.".

"In The Flirt's Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction, Richard Kaye explores these and other subjects as he makes the case for flirtation as a unique, neglected species of eros that finds its deepest, most elaborately sustained fulfillment in the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century novel."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [235]-240) and index.
Table of contents: title: Dialectical desires: the eighteenth-century coquette and the invention of nineteenth-century fictional character; title: The flirtation of species: Darwinian sexual selection and Victorian narrative; title: George Eliot and Thomas Hardy: flirtation, female choice and the revision of Darwinian belief; title: Deadly deferrals: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gustave Flaubert, and the exhaustion of flirtatious desire; title: "Acceptable hints of infinity": dissident desires and the erotics of countermodernism.