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.