Richard A. Kaye is Assistant Professor of English at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

• 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.

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 Theory