What makes stories about portraits so gripping and unsettling? Through close readings of nineteenth-century portrait stories from different literary traditions, the book analyzes the way subjectivity is produced in relation to representations, focusing on the power to represent, especially its relation to gender, and on the act of seeing.

Michal Peled Ginsburg is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. She is the author of Flaubert Writing: A Study in Narrative Strategies and Economies of Change: Form and Transformation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel as well as the co-author of a book on the Israeli novelist David Shahar.