Gretchen Schultz explores how male writers and their readers in late nineteenth-century France took lesbianism as a cipher for apprehensions about sex and gender during a time of social and political upheaval. 

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Preface

Introduction: Backstories
1. The Poetics of Lesbian Identification
2. Tribades for Sale: Popular Fiction and Backroom Books
3. Dystopian Sapphism: Anti-Feminism, Class Warfare, and the Elite Novel at the Fin du Siècle
4. Scientia sapphica
5. Intertexts and Afterlives: From the French Canon to US Pulp Fiction

Works Cited 
Index

Gretchen Schultz is a professor in the Department of French Studies at Brown University.