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
Alexander the Great, Or, the Rival Queens. A Tragedy
Language: en
Pages: 512
Authors: Nathaniel Lee
Categories:
Type: BOOK - Published: 1815 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Death in the Floating City
Language: en
Pages: 282
Authors: Tasha Alexander
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-10-16 - Publisher: Minotaur Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Huffington Post calls Tears of Pearl author Tasha Alexander "one to watch—and read" and her new Lady Emily mystery set in Venice proves it! Years ago, Emi
The Good Death
Language: en
Pages: 250
Authors: Ann Neumann
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-02-07 - Publisher: Beacon Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Following the death of her father, journalist and hospice volunteer Ann Neumann sets out to examine what it means to die well in the United States. When Ann Neu
Tragedy and the Tragic in German Literature, Art, and Thought
Language: en
Pages: 382
Authors: Stephen D. Dowden
Categories: Art
Type: BOOK - Published: 2014 - Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Essays in this volume seek to clarify the meaning of tragedy and the tragic in its many German contexts, art forms, and disciplines, from literature and philoso