Description
Megan Abbott has authored twelve novels, co-created a TV series, and is a respected critical scholar on crime fiction and domestic noir. This is the first book-length study of her major novels. Girl Detectives and Gothic Femininity traces the development of Abbott's evolving use of genre tropes from crime fiction to horror and the gothic in order to elucidate the way her work exposes and dismantles sexist and misogynistic cultural narratives constraining the lives of women and girls, and explores how those narratives can be exposed, resisted, and even escaped. This study analyzes each of Abbott's eight post-hardboiled novels to trace how she marries crime fiction and gothic tropes with feminist characterizations and concerns in order to make arguments about the treacherous consequences of sexism and misogyny, and to conceive of possibilities for resistance and liberation for her characters. Her interest in both the recognition of and the resistance to pernicious assumptions about women and girls makes Abbott an important voice in twenty-first-century American feminist literature, and Girl Detectives and Gothic Femininity provides a starting place for more scholarly attention to her work.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Dark Messy Stuff
Chapter 1: Crime and Fairy Tales in The End of Everything
Chapter 2: Crime and Girl Power in Dare Me
Chapter 3: Crime and Sickness in The Fever
Chapter 4: Gothic Motherhood in You Will Know Me
Chapter 5: Gothic Ambition in Give Me Your Hand
Chapter 6: Gothic Abuse in The Turnout
Chapter 7: Gothic Liberation in Beware the Woman
Epilogue: A Turn of The Wheel
Works Cited
About the Author
Product details
| Published | 20 Aug 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 272 |
| ISBN | 9781978765658 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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