"During the nineteenth century, literature shared with the medical and psychological sciences a strategy of examining the most extreme manifestations of human desire. In this study, Lisa Downing rescues necrophilia from the margins of sexuality, relocating it as a symptom and pervasive fantasy of modern subjectivity. Drawing case material from the nineteenth-century French canon, the author brings works by Baudelaire and Rachilde into dialogue with fundamental European texts of sexology and psycho-analysis. She reads against the grain of traditional Freudian theories of sexuality, of conventions of nineteenth-century literary scholarship and of 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 nineteenth-century France and beyond."--BOOK JACKET.