Zuleika Dobson; or, An Oxford Love Story

by Max Beerbohm · audio summary, about 10 min

When the devastatingly alluring conjurer Zuleika Dobson visits Oxford during Eights Week, the entire undergraduate student body falls fatally in love with her.

Key ideas

• Dandyism and aesthetic vanity value self-display and formal perfection far above human feeling and survival.
• Desire operates on a fatal paradox: an absolute need to love that is immediately extinguished the moment affection is returned.
• Crowd psychology and snobbery can transform an individual's eccentric whim into an epidemic of collective destruction.
• The indifferent, enduring beauty of academic institutions outlasts the transient follies and tragedies of youth.

This summary and its voice are made with AI from the public-domain book. They can be wrong.

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