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Notes introduction 1. Kundera, Immortality, 196–97. 2. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 29. 3. Bersani, A Future for Astyanax, 76. 4. Polhemus,Erotic Faith, 4. For an earlier articulation of this theme, see Polhemus, Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 5. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse on the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, 338. 6. For example, Michael Mason has argued that the commonplace perception of nineteenth-century sexual culture as fostering prudery and hypocrisy is misguided. In what he claims is less a refutation of Foucault than an exploration of the “field of bodies and pleasures” ignored by Foucault, Mason’s study contends that Victorian sexual moralism, embraced by members of the upper class and the poor, encouraged citizens to be agnostic, radically minded, and sexually contingent. Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality. 7. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, 76, 85. Miller’s theory of the panopticon has even been employed for eighteenth-century fiction in the work of John Bender. 8. Miller, The Novel and the Police, 21. 9. Sedgwick, Between Men; Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet. For a similar perspective , see Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act. Lately Sedgwick has expressed partial regret at what she now calls a “paranoid position ” in queer readings of the novel, endorsing what she terms a “reparative reading position,” in which “selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.” See Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You,” introduction to Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, 35. 10. Henry James, Review of Hardy’sFar from the Madding Crowd (Dec. 24, 1874), in Henry James: Literary Criticism (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1048. 11. Barbara Leckie’s recent path-breaking study, Culture and Adultery, which demonstrates , pace the literary critic Franco Moretti, that between 1847 and 1914 adultery was neither invisible in the English novel, as Moretti claims, nor absent in other cultural formations, inevitably finds its study dealing with the legal inflections of adulterous desire. Indeed, Leckie brilliantly explores the relation between Victorian trials, censorship legislation, sensation fiction, and modernist texts such as James’sThe Golden Bowl to argue that in serious fiction adultery emerged as a question of epistemology rather than a matter of passion. Flirtation, however risky, seldom falls within the purview of the law, and it is one of the features of flirtation that allows it to retain its radical force. Adultery lends itself to surveillance and legal strictures; flirtation, expertly deployed, renders them meaningless. 12. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 308. 13. Jürgen Habermas, “Georg Simmel on Philosophy and Culture: Postscript to a Collection of Essays.” Translated by Mathieu Deflem, Critical Inquiry 22 (spring 1996), 405. 14. For a penetrating analysis of Simmel’s preoccupation with neurotic forms of urban behavior owing to an aversion to excessive stimulation in the metropolis, see David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin (London: Heinemann, 1985), 72–77. 15. Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” 214; Benjamin, “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 173. 16. Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” 217. 17. Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, 158. 18. Robert Darnton, The Hidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). 19. For a discussion of time as it operates in eighteenth-century pornographic literature , see Jean-Marie Goulemot, Forbidden Texts: Erotic Literature and Its Readers in Eighteenth-Century France, trans. James Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 20. Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Flirt (London: Armitage, 1851), 103. 21. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849–50; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1986), 140. 22. See, for example, Yeazell’s Fictions of Modesty, which I discuss later in this introduction as well as in my chapter on Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. 23. Le nouveau petit Robert (Paris: Maury, 1993), 936. There are no direct citations given for these usages. 24. A sentence from Swift that Johnson provided to illustrate the word’s meaning lent support to this sense of coquetting as crossing lines of gender: “You are coquetting a maid of honor, my lord looking on to see how the gamesters play, and I railing at you both.” Quoted in Samuel Johnson, Johnson’s Dictionary: A Modern Selection, ed. E. L. McAdam Jr. and George...

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