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Hysteria, an elusive and polymorphous disease associated with the female body, was first diagnosed in Greek Antiquity. When, in the late nineteenth-century, Sigmund Freud decided to study it, he made discoveries that shaped in a decisive way the new science of psychoanalysis and offered new foundations for discussions of what we might now call “psychosomatic illness.” Though rarely diagnosed nowadays, hysteria provides a fascinating introduction to medical, clinical, social, and ethical questions connected to gender that have lost none of their relevance. We will study fictional narratives from the 18th century to the present as if they were case-studies -- as a way of appraising hysteria’s changing and provocatively volatile definitions across time and in different cultural frameworks. Among our topics: trauma and PTSD, the concept of repression, masculinities, women and madness, and, above all, transformations in gender roles and identities in the modern era. In addition to selected readings of medical and historical materials available on Blackboard, texts for study are: The Nun (Diderot), Trilby (du Maurier), Fragment of a Case of Hysteria (Freud), Regeneration (Barker), The Icarus Girl (Oyeyemi), Redeployment (Klay).