Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Fiction and the Poetics of Flirtation -- Chapter 1: Dialectical Desires: The Eighteenth-Century Coquette and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Fictional Character -- Chapter 2: The Flirtation of Species: Darwinian Sexual Selection and Victorian Narrative -- Chapter 3: George Eliot and Thomas Hardy: Flirtation, Female Choice, and the Revision of Darwinian Belief -- Chapter 4: Deadly Deferrals: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gustave Flaubert, and the Exhaustion of Flirtatious Desire -- Chapter 5: "Acceptable Hints of Infinity": Dissident Desires and the Erotics of Countermodernism -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index.