The Flirt's Tragedy
Desire Without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction
Richard A. Kaye(Author)
University of Virginia Press
Will be published approx. on 29. May 2002
Book
Hardback
272 pages
978-0-8139-2100-6 (ISBN)
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 harbours potentially tragic consequences, a perilous game then adapted by male flirts in the novels of Oscar Wilde and Henry James. In works by D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Foster, flirtation comes to reshape the modernist representation of homoerotic relations. In this study, Richard Kaye makes a case for flirtation as a unique, neglected species of eros that finds its deepest, most elaborately sustained fulfillment in the 19th century and early 20th century novel. The author examines flirtation in major English, French and American texts to demonstrate how the changing aesthetic of such fiction fastened on flirtatious desire as a paramount subject for distinctly novelistic inquiry. The novel, he argues, accentuated questions of ambiguity on which an erotics of deliberate imprecision thrived.
Reviews / Votes
Amusing and absorbing. Richard Kaye's The Flirt's Tragedy brilliantly intuits new ways of reading the importance of flirtation in the history of the English novel. From Jane Austen to E. M. Forster, Kaye proposes, flirtation is not to be understood as a merely stock narrative element nor as a merely dated social convention. It is instead a significant marker of formal transformation in the development of novelistic form. -Robert L. Caserio, Temple University, author of The Novel in England, 1900-1950: History and TheoryMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Charlottesville
United States
Illustrations
references, index
Dimensions
Height: 242 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 26 mm
Weight
606 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8139-2100-6 (9780813921006)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
05/2002
1st Edition
Naval Institute Press
from
€101.29
Available for download
Person
Richard A. Kaye is Assistant Professor of English at Hunter College of the City University of New York.
Content
Dialectical desires: the eighteenth-century coquette and the invention of nineteenth-century fictional character -- The flirtation of species: Darwinian sexual selection and Victorian narrative -- George Eliot and Thomas Hardy: flirtation, female choice and the revision of Darwinian belief -- Deadly deferrals: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gustave Flaubert, and the exhaustion of flirtatious desire -- ""Acceptable hints of infinity"": dissident desires and the erotics of countermodernism.