The Flirt's Tragedy

The Flirt's Tragedy
Author :
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Total Pages : 258
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780813922003
ISBN-13 : 0813922003
Rating : 4/5 (003 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Flirt's Tragedy by : Richard A. Kaye

Download or read book The Flirt's Tragedy written by Richard A. Kaye and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2002-05-29 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the flirtation plots of novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, 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 makes a 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. The author examines flirtation in major British, 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 and ambivalence on which an erotics of deliberate imprecision thrived. But the impact of flirtation was not only formal. Kaye views coquetry as an arena of freedom built on a dialectic of simultaneous consent and refusal, as well as an expression of "managed desire," a risky display of female power, and a cagey avenue for the expression of dissident sexualities. Through coquetry, novelists offered their response to important scientific and social changes and to the rise of the metropolis as a realm of increasingly transient amorous relations. Challenging current trends in gender, post-gender, and queer-theory criticism, and considering texts as diverse as Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, Kaye insists that critical appraisals of Victorian and Edwardian fiction must move beyond existing paradigms defining considerations of flirtation in the novel. The Flirt’s Tragedy offers a lively, revisionary, often startling assessment of nineteenth-century fiction that will alter our understanding of the history of the novel.


The Flirt's Tragedy Related Books

The Flirt's Tragedy
Language: en
Pages: 258
Authors: Richard A. Kaye
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2002-05-29 - Publisher: University of Virginia Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the flirtation plots of novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and W. M. Thackeray, heroines learn sociability through competition with naughty coquette-d
Flirt
Language: en
Pages: 127
Authors: Laurell K. Hamilton
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2010-02-02 - Publisher: Penguin

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Anita Blake has been asked to raise the dead-but the results aren't going to make everybody happy...
The Flirt
Language: en
Pages: 304
Authors: Rachelle Nelson
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 1995-12-01 - Publisher: Jove Publications

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Family beauty Venus Daltry is horrified when she is assigned the task of accompanying dime novelist Sanford Buchanan on his year-long horseback trek from Texas
The Flirt
Language: en
Pages: 408
Authors: Booth Tarkington
Categories: Autographs
Type: BOOK - Published: 1915 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Flirt Fearlessly
Language: en
Pages: 194
Authors: Rachel DeAlto
Categories: Family & Relationships
Type: BOOK - Published: 2013-06-01 - Publisher: Morgan James Publishing

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Flirting comes naturally to some, but others often need a little practice before they feel confident approaching and engaging people they find attractive. "Flir