Girl Detectives and Gothic Femininity

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.