Desiring the Dead

In the 19th century, literature shared with the medical and psychological sciences a strategy of examining the most extreme manifestations of human desire. Drawing case material from the 19th-century French canon, the author brings works by Baudelaire and Rachilde into dialogue with key European texts of sexology and psychoanalysis. She reads against the grain of traditional Freudian theories of sexuality, and feminist critiques of the masculine morbid aesthetic in order to bring to light a model of desire whose problematic nature afflicts existing discourses about sexuality and gender in 19th-century France and beyond.