#FakeDating Classics Collection

#FakeDating Classics Collection gathers courtship plots, social masquerades, strategic engagements, and performed identities from across the long nineteenth century and its afterlives. Moving among comedy of manners, epistolary fiction, realist social panorama, romance, satire, and psychological novel, the volume reveals "fake dating" not as a merely modern trope but as a durable device for testing class, gender, money, reputation, and desire. Its standout situations—feigned attachments that become moral experiments, public performances that expose private feeling, and calculated alliances that unsettle inherited expectations—show the formal versatility of the convention. The contributors span British, French, and American literary traditions, bringing together writers associated with the eighteenth-century novel of sensibility, Romantic and popular romance, Victorian realism, aesthetic comedy, transatlantic modernity, and the novel of manners. Their varied social worlds—aristocratic salons, marriage markets, provincial communities, cosmopolitan drawing rooms, and commercial modernity—make deception and courtship legible as historical practices as well as narrative pleasures. Collectively, these voices illuminate how intimacy is shaped by institutions and how performance may both enforce and resist social norms. Ideal for students, scholars, and pleasure readers alike, this collection offers an unusually rich comparative encounter with a familiar premise. Readers will find educational insight in its historical breadth and sustained delight in the dialogue among radically different styles, sensibilities, and visions of love.