Overview

An exploration of representations of female criminality in contemporary French crime fiction, this book offers a literary, sociological and feminist analysis of the stereotypes surrounding women and crime. Surveying how these stereotypes are both invoked and disrupted, it covers Pierre Lemaitre’s Alex, Fred Vargas’s Quand Sort la Recluse (This Poison Will Remain), Leïla Slimani’s Chanson Douce (Lullaby) and Hannelore Cayre’s La Daronne (The Godmother) in their original French and their English translations. Addressing the gap of scholarly interest in legal and cultural representations of female violence in French crime fiction, Ciara Gorman evaluates the subversive ways in which archetypes of female criminality — ranging from the femme fatale to the witch, and from the mère fatale to the ‘bitch’ — are deployed not as reductive shorthands about femininity, but as motors of innovation and resistance. The form and plot of each text is examined for its potential as a polar féministe (feminist crime fiction), a crime novel which incorporates the concerns of feminism — be that the prevalence of sexual and sexist violence in society, or the legacy of misogynist representations of women in the crime genre as a whole. Criminal Women considers the female criminal character as a figure of opportunity, the point at which readers and writers alike may reassess their assumptions about female criminality, and about the feminist potential of crime fiction itself.

Full Product Details

9781350529410

Table of Contents

Reviews

In exploring female criminals across a number of crime fiction genres—vigilante narrative, police procedural, domestic noir, and hardboiled—Gorman makes important and timely arguments, teasing out the implications of traditional and more subversive depictions of female criminals. Elegantly written and theoretically compelling, this is a must-read for scholars of French crime fiction and of feminist detective fiction. * Pamela Bedore, Associate Professor of English, University of Connecticut, USA *

Author Information

Ciara Gorman is Assistant Professor in French and Francophone Studies at Maynooth University, Ireland.

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