Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe claim has been made that the nineteenth century's interest in libertine fiction is merely ""archival."" This dissertation seeks to contest that claim by examining the reuse of certain well-known, if not notorious, characters from European seduction narratives of the fifteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries--Valmont, Don Juan, and Tannhuser--in the work of George Gordon, Lord Byron, Charles Baudelaire, Algernon Swinburne, and Aubrey Beardsley. It finds that these seducers are not static characters deployed for the purpose of allusion or critique, but heroes, reworked and rehabilitated as the central figures of literary seductions intended to entice and control the reader and address the perceived inequities of nineteenth-century morality or politics. By applying a four-phase framework for seduction derived from canonical seduction narratives, the argument demonstrates how the reinvented seducers have been stripped down, personalized, redressed, and recontextualized in narratives that seek to compel through seduction and educate through experience