Why Do Women Fall for the Bad Boyfriend? New Book by C.W. Post Professor
C.W. Post English Professor explores "the dangerous lover" in
new book that looks at famous literary figures throughout the ages

Brookville, NY -- For as long as there have been boyfriends there have been bad boyfriends. And for as long as there have been stories, there have been stories about bad boyfriends. The world of literature is pock-marked by the emotional scars that characters such as Rhett Butler, Heathcliff and Max de Winter have left on the hearts of their lovers ... and their readers.

But why are women so attracted to these tormented and tormenting antiheroes, both on the page and off? "The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative" (Ohio State Press, 2006), a new non-fiction book by Deborah Lutz, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Victorian literature at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, approaches this question by looking at famous literary figures throughout the ages and investigating what it means to long for the unknown and to yearn for the destructive, the disturbing and the terrifying.

"This character, the dangerous lover, is everywhere ... and I mean everywhere," she says, noting that despite their ubiquitous literary presence there has never before been a study of these dark and mysterious men with their magnetic gaze and arrogant swagger.

Dr. Lutz, who has published extensively on erotica, Victorian pornography and popular culture, is never apologetic about women's erotic desires for danger. Instead she looks at the ways people are forced to confront the perils of existence and sometimes even embrace the confusion and darkness of being a desiring person in our world.

"I find that many women question their attraction to these types and feel bad about it, like it's embarrassing," she says. "My book looks at the phenomenon unapologetically and links it to basic philosophical ideas about what it means to be human."

The examples Dr. Lutz uses are not only drawn from dusty Victorian novels with their sexist infrastructure and demeaning social climate. Modern-day fiction, whether it be the romance novel or the "chick lit" genre, provides many examples toward her conclusions. The book muses about attraction in any era and develops various theories to explain it.

"It's not a psychoanalytic book, nor a self-help one," she says, while noting that many women can use fiction to draw parallels between themselves and the scorned and the betrayed. "It is something of a celebration of these kinds of desires rather than a condemnation of them."

Dr. Lutz received her Ph.D. in 2004 from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Recent publications include "Dandies, Libertines, and Byronic Lovers: Pornography and Erotic Decadence in Nineteenth-Century England" in Decadence in English Literature (Ibidem Press); "The Secret Rooms in My Secret Life," English Studies in Canada 31; "Love as Homesickness:  Longing for a Transcendental Home in Byron and the Dangerous Lover Narrative," The Midwest Quarterly; "The Erotics of Ontology: Failed Presence in Heidegger and the Mass-Market Romance," Comparative Literature and Culture; and "Kafka's Itinerary: Toward a Writing of Failure," The George Washington Review.  She is currently working on a book on Victorian sexual radicals. 

For more information regarding this book visit www.ohiostatepress.org or call 800-621-2736.

Posted: February 27, 2007