SOURCE: Micale, Mark S. “Strange Signs of the Times.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4911 (16 May 1997): 6-7.

In the following review, Micale praises Showalter's examination of feminine hysteria in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture.

The ritualized self-immolation of thirty-nine members of the Heaven's Gate sect near San Diego, California, late last March could almost be seen as a promotional event for Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture, Elaine Showalter's provocative and immensely readable new book. Showalter examines a series of large-scale functional psychopathologies, originating in the United States but now metastasizing, that she reads as the pandemic hysterias, or “psychological plagues”, of the late twentieth century. That emotional distress can emerge through bodily symptoms, and that styles of psychosomatic suffering vary among cultures and periods, is an accepted insight of modern medicine. On the eve of the millennium, Showalter's book suggests, the dominant psychogenic sicknesses have taken especially florid...