The dangerous lover has haunted our culture for over two hundred years; English, American, and European literature is permeated with his erotic presence. The Dangerous Lover takes seriously the ubiquity of the brooding romantic hero—his dark past, his remorseful and rebellious exile from comfortable everyday living. Deborah Lutz traces the recent history of this figure, through the melancholy iconoclasm of the Romantics, the lost soul redeemed by love of the Brontës, and the tormented individualism of twentieth-century love narratives. Arguing for this character’s central influence not only in literature but also in the history of ideas, this book places the dangerous lover firmly within the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the Modernism of Georg Lukács, and Roland Barthes’s theories on love and longing. Working with canonical authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Charles Maturin, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde, and also with non-canonical texts such as contemporary romance, The Dangerous Lover combines a lyrical, essayistic style with a depth of inquiry that raises questions about the mysteries of desire, death, and eroticism.

The Dangerous Lover is the first book-length study of this pervasive literary hero; it also challenges the tendency of sophisticated philosophical readings of popular narratives and culture to focus on male-coded genres. In its conjunction of high and low literary forms, this volume explores new historical and cultural framings for female-coded popular narratives.

Devoted fans and scholars of Jane Austen—as well as skeptics—will rejoice at Tony Tanner’s superb book on the incomparable novelist. Distilling twenty years of thinking and writing about Austen, Tanner treats in fresh and illuminating ways the questions that have always occupied her most perceptive critics. How can we reconcile the limited social world of her novels with the largeness of her vision? How does she deal with depicting a once-stable society that was changing alarmingly during her lifetime? How does she express and control the sexuality and violence beneath the well-mannered surface of her milieu? How does she resolve the problems of communication among characters pinioned by social reticences?

Tanner guides us through Austen’s novels from relatively sunny early works to the darker, more pessimistic Persuasion and fragmentary Sanditon—a journey that takes her from acceptance of a society maintained by landed property, family, money, and strict propriety through an insistence on the need for authentication of these values to a final skepticism and even rejection. In showing her progress from a parochial optimism to an ability to encompass her whole society, Tanner renews our sense of Jane Austen as one of the great novelists, confirming both her local and abiding relevance.