How does one dominant literary genre fall into decline, to be superseded by another? The classic instance is the rise of the novel in the nineteenth century, and how it came to embody the tragic vision of life which had previously been the domain of drama. Dr King focuses on three novelists, George Eliot. Thomas Hardy and Henry James. All three, while trying to offer a realistic picture of life in prose narrative, wrote with the concept of tragedy clearly in mind. The concern was widespread, and Victorian literary critics found themselves discussing the problem of how one might reconcile concepts as dissimilar as tragedy and realism. Their criticism provides Dr King with her starting point. Dr King examines the work of her three authors in relation to the large concepts of traditional tragic thought, and also examines how the form of specific novels was affected by their differing ideas of tragedy.
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 reimagining of Jane Eyre as a gutsy, heroic serial killer that The New York Times Book Review calls “wonderfully entertaining” and USA Today describes as “sheer mayhem meets Victorian propriety”—nominated for the 2017 Edgar Award for Best Novel. “Reader, I murdered him.” A sensitive orphan, Jane Steele suffers first at the hands of her spiteful aunt and predatory cousin, then at a grim school where she fights for her very life until escaping to London, leaving the corpses of her tormentors behind her. After years of hiding from the law while penning macabre “last confessions” of the recently hanged, Jane thrills at discovering an advertisement. Her aunt has died and her childhood home has a new master: Mr. Charles Thornfield, who seeks a governess. Burning to know whether she is in fact the rightful heir, Jane takes the position incognito and learns that Highgate House is full of marvelously strange new residents—the fascinating but caustic Mr. Thornfield, an army doctor returned from the Sikh Wars, and the gracious Sikh butler Mr. Sardar Singh, whose history with Mr. Thornfield appears far deeper and darker than they pretend. As Jane catches ominous glimpses of the pair’s violent history and falls in love with the gruffly tragic Mr. Thornfield, she faces a terrible dilemma: Can she possess him—body, soul, and secrets—without revealing her own murderous past? “A thrill ride of a novel. A must read for lovers of Jane Eyre, dark humor, and mystery.”—PopSugar.com
I'm coming for you. The whispers haunt her dreams and fill her waking hours with dread. Something odd is happening. Something...unnatural. Possession of the living. Resurrection of the dead. And Natalie Stewart is caught right in the middle. Jonathon, the one person she thought she could trust, has become a double agent for the dark side. But he plays the part so well, Natalie has to wonder just how much he's really acting. She can't even see what it is she's fighting. But the cost of losing her heart, her sanity...her soul. Praise for Darker Still, an Indie Next Selection: "Original, haunting, and romantic." -YA Bound "This chilling tale will draw you in and keep you guessing until the very last page." -Seventeen.com
When Robert Pomeroy, a young undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, finds a letter slipped under his door in the early hours of a rainy day, he flies into a panic. Hastily readying himself and dashing off a few lines for the porter to summon his friend Nicholas Thorpe, he hurries to the railway station. But he doesn't reach his destination alive. Inspector Colbeck and Sergeant Leeming are called upon to investigate this tragedy on the railway. It soon becomes apparent that Cambridge's hopes of success in the forthcoming Boat Race rested on Pomeroy's shoulders. With academic disputes, romantic interests and a sporting rivalry with Oxford in play, the Railway Detective will have his work cut out to disentangle the threads of Pomeroy's life in order to answer the truth of his death.
Ralph Peters' Darkness at Chancellorsville is a novel of one of the most dramatic battles in American history, from the New York Times bestselling, three-time Boyd Award-winning author of the Battle Hymn Cycle. Centered upon one of the most surprising and dramatic battles in American history, Darkness at Chancellorsville recreates what began as a brilliant, triumphant campaign for the Union—only to end in disaster for the North. Famed Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson bring off an against-all-odds surprise victory, humiliating a Yankee force three times the size of their own, while the Northern army is torn by rivalries, anti-immigrant prejudice and selfish ambition. This historically accurate epic captures the high drama, human complexity and existential threat that nearly tore the United States in two, featuring a broad range of fascinating—and real—characters, in blue and gray, who sum to an untold story about a battle that has attained mythic proportions. And, in the end, the Confederate triumph proved a Pyrrhic victory, since it lured Lee to embark on what would become the war's turning point—the Gettysburg Campaign (featured in Cain At Gettysburg). At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Benjamin Dewey's The Tragedy Series is an addictive collection of funny-sad comics based on the popular Tumblr blog. Welcome and good tidings, ladies, gentlemen, and all manner of upstanding, sentient beasts. The book you hold in your hands (pinchers, tentacles, paws, etc.), is a guide to avoiding the more common pitfalls that appear after parting ways with lady luck. You need not be duped by a collection of rats in an elaborate costume, dressed as a handsome suitor, or experience the embarrassment so many have already endured after bringing their ordinarily well-behaved, large sea mammal to an art gallery only to see cultural treasures defiled by inadvertent clumsiness arising from a frame better built for the confines of Poseidon's realm. More than five hundred unfortunate results of the manifold paths our life may offer have been helpfully diagramed for you along with positive affirmations of this veil's wonders and much more! Alexander the Great once remarked that "upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all" and his words may be taken as injunction to obtain this volume for your very own to ensure the continued security of our very civilization.
