In Sexing the Mind, Evelyne Ender traces the strange, loaded history of hysteria through nineteenth-century literature, medicine, psychoanalysis, and gender theory.

Rather than treating hysteria as a neat diagnostic category, Ender follows it as a cultural fiction: a way of making women’s minds, bodies, speech, modesty, desire, illness, and “excess” legible to the systems trying to contain them.

Moving through writers including Henry James and George Sand, the book examines how literary form and medical thought fed each other, producing femininity as something to be read, diagnosed, theatricalised, corrected, or feared. It’s a sharp academic study of how gender gets staged as pathology — and how the so-called irrational woman often exposes the nervous machinery of the supposedly rational world around her.

One for readers interested in feminist literary criticism, psychoanalysis, medical history, hysteria, nineteenth-century fiction, and the long horror show of men mistaking their interpretive panic for knowledge.

Paperback, first published by Cornell University Press in 1995. Good used condition with light shelf wear and handling; internally clean. Academic title with bibliography and index.