Disruptive Women of Literature - Rooting for the Antiheroine

This book critically examines the literary antiheroine in contemporary Gothic and crime-thriller novels. Gardner explores a broad range of texts to understand the antiheroine's fluidity, her liminal and abject existence, and what these suggest about cultural anxieties surrounding transgressive women.

List of contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Contextualising the Antiheroine Figure in Western Literary History
Chapter One: Archetypes, Heroes, and the Mythic Origins of the Antiheroine Figure
Chapter Two: Literary vs Television Iterations and an Ever-Evolving Definition
Chapter Three: Exploring the Antiheroine's Literary Ancestor: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Notions of Transgression
Chapter Four: Politicising the Personal: The Antiheroine and the Women's Liberation Movement
Part Two: The Gothic Antiheroine: Defying Deviancy
Chapter Five: The Female Gothic and its Fresh Façade
Chapter Six: Navigating the Antiheroine's Internalised Misogyny: The Transformative Power of Female Friendship in Cat's Eye and The Robber Bride
Chapter Seven: Engaging with the Gothic: Domestic Spaces, Female Friendships, and the Weaponisation of Motherhood in The Woman Upstairs, The Paper Wasp and Eileen
Part Three: Serial Killers, Abject Wives, and Avenging Punks: The Antiheroine's Negotiation of Patriarchal Cycles of Violence in Crime-Thriller Fiction
Chapter Eight: Rewriting the Victim Narrative and the Impact of Millennium
Chapter Nine: 'Three, and they label you a serial killer': Questions of Gender and Violence in My Sister, the Serial Killer
Chapter Ten: The Maiming of the Body: Lisbeth, Amy, and Camille
Chapter Eleven: Breaking the Cycle of Patriarchal Violence: Sisterly Rivalry, the New Femme Fatale, and Lisbeth Reborn in David Lagercrantz's Millennium
Conclusion
Works Cited
About the Author

About the author

By Eleanore Gardner

Product details

• Authors: Eleanore Gardner
• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 15.07.2024
• EAN: 9781666951448
• ISBN: 978-1-66695-144-8
• No. of pages: 236
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Gothic, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women's Studies, LITERARY CRITICISM / Women Authors, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 21st Century, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Gender studies: women, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Gender studies: women and girls, Literary studies: from c 2000, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form