Criminal Femmes Fatales in American Hardboiled Crime Fiction

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

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2. Introduction

   1. Introduction

      • Maysaa Husam Jaber

      Pages 1-11

3. The “Mad-Bad” Criminal Woman

   1. The “Mad-Bad” Criminal Woman

      • Maysaa Husam Jaber

      Pages 12-31

4. Pre-War Criminal Femmes Fatales

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 33-33

      PDF

   2. Narratives of the Underworld

      • Maysaa Husam Jaber

      Pages 35-51

   3. Narratives of Detection

      • Maysaa Husam Jaber

      Pages 52-72

   4. Narratives of Seduction

      • Maysaa Husam Jaber

      Pages 73-101

5. Post-War Criminal Femmes Fatales

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 103-103

      PDF

   2. Crime, Sex, and Paranoia in Post-War Hardboiled Paperbacks

      • Maysaa Husam Jaber

      Pages 105-112

   3. The Duality of David Goodis’s Criminal Femmes Fatales

      • Maysaa Husam Jaber

      Pages 113-128

   4. Mickey Spillane’s Criminal Femmes Fatales and the Cold War Vendetta

      • Maysaa Husam Jaber

      Pages 129-156

6. Conclusion

   1. Conclusion

      • Maysaa Husam Jaber

      Pages 157-162

7. Back Matter

   Pages 163-216

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This book fills a gap in both literary and feminist scholarship by offering the first major study of femme fatales in hardboiled crime fiction. Maysaa Jaber shows that the criminal literary figures in the genre open up powerful spaces for imagining female agency in direct opposition to the constraining forces of patriarchy and misogyny.

• Crime fiction
• Femme fatale
• Agency
• Patriarchy
• Gender
• America
• femme fatale
• fiction
• hardboiled fiction
• misogyny
• Narrative

• University of Baghdad, Iraq

  Maysaa Husam Jaber

Maysaa Husam Jaber is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Baghdad, Iraq. She was a fellow in The University of Massachusetts Boston, USA from September to November 2013. She has published with Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge Scholars Publishing and the Arab World English Journal.

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