Representations of female criminality in twenty-first-century French crime fiction

However, there is a lacuna in French and Francophone scholarship regarding the depiction of criminal women in crime fiction specifically. The present thesis addresses this gap, and evaluates the subversive approach to the female criminal character displayed by the above-mentioned authors — who deploy the archetypes of female criminality not as reductive shorthands, but as motors for innovation and resistance. This resistance is feminist in nature, as the female criminal is contextualised with reference to circumstances of inequality and injustice both fictional and real.

I thus consider these novels as examples of the polar féministe, where the concerns of feminism are taken up and woven into the plot of the crime novel and even alter the genre conventions on which it draws. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the archetypes of female criminality are useful tools for the advancement of feminist principles in crime fiction, offering to writers and readers alike the opportunity to reassess our assumptions about female criminality, and about the feminist potential of crime fiction itself.<br><br><i>Thesis is embargoed until 31 December 2028</i>.<br><br><br>