Sexing the mind

Description:

Sexing the Mind looks at scenes of hysteria in works by George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, and Henry James, as well as in the writings of Sigmund Freud, showing how these texts represent distinctive attempts to break loose from erotic, political, and epistemological models of Victorian masculinity and femininity. Through her approach, which is both closely textual (reading against the grain in psychoanalytic and feminist fashion) and historical (retracing in medical and literary texts the manifestations of hysteria), Ender uncovers a series of discursive structures that "engender" the modern subject. Her book probes the interplay of writing, subjectivity, and sexual identity, and succeeds in showing how the nineteenth-century view of hysteria, from Sand to the early Freud, displays the competing claims of male/female consciousness.

subjects: American and French,  Comparative Literature,  Fiction,  French and American,  History and criticism,  Hysteria in literature,  Knowledge,  Psychoanalysis and literature,  Psychological fiction,  Psychology,  Sex (Psychology) in literature,  Women in literature,  Sex (Psychology)in literature,  James, henry, 1843-1916,  Sand, george, 1804-1876,  Fiction, history and criticism,  Hysteria,  Sex (psychology),  Comparative literature, american and french,  Knowledge and learning,  Medicine in Literature,  Modern Literature,  Gender Identity,  Women

People: George Sand (1804-1876),  Henry James (1843-1916)

Times: 19th century