Elaine Showalter’s Hystories is a provocative late-90s study of hysteria, mass media, medical narrative and cultural panic.

Moving through chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, recovered memory, multiple personality disorder, satanic ritual abuse and alien abduction, Showalter argues that modern “epidemics” can spread through story, suggestion, institutional language and media amplification as much as through bodies.

It’s thorny, interesting, and not exactly a book designed to make everyone feel tucked in. Showalter is one of the major figures in feminist literary criticism, and here she brings that machinery to the borderland between medicine, media, narrative and belief. A strong one for readers interested in psychoanalysis, feminist theory, cultural studies, medical humanities or the intricacies of moral panic.

First published 1997 by Columbia University Press; first published in Great Britain 1997 by Picador. This copy is the 1997 Picador hardback, with full number line. Good used condition, with light shelf wear.