Gender and the Novel

This course explores how major authors represented gender and sexuality. Obsessed with unlocking the mystery of femininity, novelists attempted to represent truths about sexual difference while new scientific discourses (psychiatry, sexology, criminology) aimed to analyze gender and sexual deviance in objective terms. Authors include: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Rachilde, Foucault, and 19th-century scientific texts.