Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"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."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface (p. ix)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• Chapter 1 Nineteenth-Century Hysteria: The Medical Context (p. 25)
• Chapter 2 Henry James and George Sand: Scenes of Passion, Scenes of Hysteria (p. 67)
• Chapter 3 The Bostonians: Representing the """"Sentiment of Sex"""" (p. 99)
• Chapter 4 Engendering the Mind: James, Freud, and George Sand (p. 135)
• Chapter 5 Reading Sexual Difference: The Case of George Sand (p. 187)
• Chapter 6 Girls and Their Blind Visions: George Eliot, Hysteria, and History (p. 229)
• Always Secrets of the Alcove: a Postscript (p. 273)
• Bibliograpby (p. 289)
• Index (p. 301)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This is a subtle, difficult, and very European book. Some readers will be put off by its dense poststructural collaboration of literature, feminism, and psychoanalysis and by its relentless, intense, close engagement with texts. To others it will seem like the only way to read. Ender has a deep historical grasp of the making of gender ideology in the 19th century, and she pursues a kind of literary typology of hysteria, tracking it as a profoundly ambivalent psychocultural response to an ideology that in different hands exhibits varying degrees of surrender and resistance. She analyzes "what might be some of [the] consequences, for a history of the subject and for a history of the relations between men and women" of the enforced "law of gender" or "grammar of the sexes"; she wants to understand the writing of the hysteric as "an effigy of the mind haunted by a question of gender." She weaves together astonishingly fresh, absorbing takes on Henry James, George Eliot, Freud, and particularly George Sand. Ender's idiomatic ease in English, French, and German gives the reader confidence in her critical authority and steeps her argument in a rich multilingual compost of primary and secondary sources. Language crossover, however (the book was originally composed in French), may also account for the outrageous number of typos throughout the text. There is an ample, learned bibliography and user-friendly footnotes and index. Graduates; researchers. F. Alaya Ramapo College of New Jersey