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Abstract
Converging primarily on nineteenth-century English literature, this study traces a literary-historical as well as philosophical trajectory of the eroticism of the male lover whose dark past, his remorseful and rebellious exile from comfortable everyday living, point to the dangerous difficulties of existence itself. Beginning with the contemporary romance and moving backward to the Gothic, then up through Byron and the nineteenth century, this work investigates how the dangerous lover figures into history on the side of silence, nescience and temporal interruption, rather than continuity and teleology.
Chapter one culls theories of dangerous love from the contemporary “erotic” historical genre. The eroticism of the hero of this genre centers on his quality of dwelling in the unknown, outside the bounds of knowledge and society, and points to the impossibility of knowing the other. The dangerous lover's eroticism can be understood in light of Heidegger's theory of ontological proximity: that what is nearest to us and most important to our authentic existence is the most unfamiliar and angst-ridden.
Chapter two explores the impotent misanthropy and inability to speak of Melmoth and other Gothic villains and his influence on later heroes and their villainous ways in the nineteenth-century seduction narrative, the twentieth-century gothic romance and erotic historical. From the Gothic uncanny the dangerous lover narrative takes the idea that love itself is uncanny, and the lover becomes a haunting being, emerging from the heroine's dark thoughts yet at the same time utterly distant and obscured.
Chapter three elucidates how Byronism constructs the lover as a transcendentally homeless wanderer and how love itself becomes a type of homesickness. The Byronic hero brings extreme subjectivities into a discourse of love, such as the insomniac, the autoerotic, and the addict.
Chapter four explores the ways in which Victorian novelists such as Dickens and Wilde set the dangerous lover, usually purposelessly malignant, against the responsible, dutiful Victorian in the two-lover motif. Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, and Wilde present a completely different version of this hero: the dandy.
This project concludes with a discussion of how love in this trajectory becomes linked with the finitude of being and with failure.
