Criminal Women in Contemporary French Crime Fiction

<JATS1:p>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’sAlex, Fred Vargas’sQuand Sort la Recluse(This Poison Will Remain), Leïla Slimani’sChanson Douce(Lullaby) and Hannelore Cayre’sLa 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 thefemme fataleto the witch, and from themère fataleto 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 apolar 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 Womenconsiders 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.</JATS1:p>