University of Technology, Sydney. / What first attracted me to crime fiction written by women? Many things, but foremost amongst them were the strong female voice found in the first person narrative, the mythical themes of challenge and resolution, social analysis and politics. Especially politics. In this dissertation I'll investigate the manner in which women writers appropriated the crime genre in the 1970s and 1980s and gave voice to the feminist utopian ideals of equality, access to work and participation in political structures. In doing so, I'll ask, did the writers set out to explore politics close to the feminist heart through the crime novel's stylised conventions of fast moving story line, the charismatic detective, exposure of corruption and the first hand observation of the social disjunction caused by it? I'll also question the authors' reasons for choosing crime when other literary forms were available to them. Was this choice made because crime fiction reflected women's changing status? Because it challenged one of the most masculine of literary bastions and gave the genre a whole new lease on life through the female voice? Or did other factors contribute to their decisions? In exploring crime fiction published since the nineteen seventies and interviewing writers about their literary intents, I will argue that crime fiction increasingly has become the genre in which major political themes are played out. Whilst many feminist non crime writers explored dysfunctional relationships with their partners, parents, and children, feminist crime fiction writers were interested in exposing dysfunctional social and economic relationships. These politics were framed in different ways and not all crime writers actively set out to write polemically. Nor did they see their fiction as a political tool. For many, the crime novel's structures lent themselves to an inadvertent exploration of social themes, an organic process, if you like, of crime and punishment, social analysis and utopian resolution. My exploration of these themes commences in Chapter One, with a broad overview of the scope of the 'political' issues central to my thesis. A serial discussion of politics, of crime writers' interpretations of their political ideas is covered in Chapters Two, Three and Four. The politics that influenced the manner in which I write concludes the dissertation. The achievement of a happy balance in relation to a multiplicity of social and political concerns, I assert throughout my work, confronts women crime writers every time they pick up their pens to write. Whether they set out to write deliberately for women or for a wider audience, to argue against feminist interpretation or, separatist, embrace it, in creating a female victim, a female villain, a female crusading detective, in anticipating their female readers, they are recreating and redefining the ways in which women see the world. And that, I will argue, is political.

University of Technology, Sydney. / What first attracted me to crime fiction written by women? Many things, but foremost amongst them were the strong female voice found in the first person narrative, the mythical themes of challenge and resolution, social analysis and politics. Especially politics. In this dissertation I'll investigate the manner in which women writers appropriated the crime genre in the 1970s and 1980s and gave voice to the feminist utopian ideals of equality, access to work and participation in political structures. In doing so, I'll ask, did the writers set out to explore politics close to the feminist heart through the crime novel's stylised conventions of fast moving story line, the charismatic detective, exposure of corruption and the first hand observation of the social disjunction caused by it? I'll also question the authors' reasons for choosing crime when other literary forms were available to them. Was this choice made because crime fiction reflected women's changing status? Because it challenged one of the most masculine of literary bastions and gave the genre a whole new lease on life through the female voice? Or did other factors contribute to their decisions? In exploring crime fiction published since the nineteen seventies and interviewing writers about their literary intents, I will argue that crime fiction increasingly has become the genre in which major political themes are played out. Whilst many feminist non crime writers explored dysfunctional relationships with their partners, parents, and children, feminist crime fiction writers were interested in exposing dysfunctional social and economic relationships. These politics were framed in different ways and not all crime writers actively set out to write polemically. Nor did they see their fiction as a political tool. For many, the crime novel's structures lent themselves to an inadvertent exploration of social themes, an organic process, if you like, of crime and punishment, social analysis and utopian resolution. My exploration of these themes commences in Chapter One, with a broad overview of the scope of the 'political' issues central to my thesis. A serial discussion of politics, of crime writers' interpretations of their political ideas is covered in Chapters Two, Three and Four. The politics that influenced the manner in which I write concludes the dissertation. The achievement of a happy balance in relation to a multiplicity of social and political concerns, I assert throughout my work, confronts women crime writers every time they pick up their pens to write. Whether they set out to write deliberately for women or for a wider audience, to argue against feminist interpretation or, separatist, embrace it, in creating a female victim, a female villain, a female crusading detective, in anticipating their female readers, they are recreating and redefining the ways in which women see the world. And that, I will argue, is political.

Three original stories are the basis for our study of rewriting during the French Ancien Regime: the story of Thibaud de la Jacquiere, that of the "sorcier Gaufridy" and that of the Marquise de Ganges, which Sade will rewrite as a novel. Having all originated from a "canard", they appear in the 1679 edition of the Histoires tragiques of Francois de Rosset, and two of them can also be found in Francois Gayot de Pitaval's Causes celebres. Each of these stories was rewritten by different authors at least three times. Using Gerard Genette's theory of the narrative, we will analyse the processes of transformation that the rewriting operates in the text, as well as the changes it imposes to its original meaning. The number of rewritings of each text---up to five for the Marquise de Gange---is a testament to the importance of textual reappropriation as much as it shows the relevance of a study which brings to light the role of rewriting in the survival of these stories.

In this critical review I will explore the aims and influences; themes, characterisation, genre and plot summaries; research impact, publication histories and critical reception of my four novels: Hitman, The Fixer, Baptism and Sacrifice. In addition, I will provide a commentary on the processes and methodology I employed in the writing of the four novels as well as a critical reflection on them. Published between 2000 and 2013, my books represent a body of work that is rooted within the British crime thriller genre. However, in the nature of the novels’ construction and target readerships, they also represent two distinct literary styles. The first two novels, Hitman and The Fixer, published in 2000 and 2001 respectively are satirical thrillers in which I experiment with genre with the intention of unsettling and confounding readers’ expectations while at the same time, testing the boundaries of what the crime fiction genre can sustain. In these two novels, I draw on a range of influences and traditions in literature, film and popular culture. The second two novels, Baptism and Sacrifice, published in 2012 and 2013 are more closely aligned to the accepted conventions of the thriller genre but are no less ambitious in their intention to explore new forms of plotting and characterisation. In their writing, I was influenced more by contemporary geo-politics, particularly surveillance, intelligence, cyber warfare and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7/7 than I was by literature and film. The latter two books continue a theme of experimentation I began in the first two, combining disparate influences to create original fiction. Further reflection will be made on the part that these novels have played, and continue to play, within my ongoing body of work as a novelist, screenwriter and Creative Writing academic.

No description available.

From the 1820s, forçats were widely portrayed in French culture across a variety of fictional and non-fictional genres. This thesis analyses this ‘convict tradition’, and relates it to the emergence of industrial literature in France, with its resolutely reader-centred approach. It argues that convicts acquired a central cultural importance in the nineteenth century because they embodied a form of transgressive individualism which fascinated bourgeois readers. Convicts functioned as screens onto which readers could project their own forbidden desires. The study analyses canonical novels by Sand, Balzac, Hugo and Zola alongside a large corpus of non-fiction, including biographies, penological or philanthropic texts, physiologies and travel literature. The circulation of stereotypes and stylistic tropes between these different genres shows the constant interaction between mainstream and elite writing, and the influence of literary representations on the perception of criminals, which shaped political decisions and penal policy. The first chapter of the study suggests that convicts gave a face to nineteenth-century concerns about the proliferation of the criminal classes, thereby allowing readers to explore these fears. At the same time, descriptions of crime were a source of scopophilic pleasure, allowing readers to indulge repressed transgressive desires, while partaking in a potentially subversive celebration of carnivalesque disorder. Chapter 2 shows how these dynamics inform Balzac’s writing in his ‘Vautrin cycle’, drawing readers into a game of open secrets and deferred recognition, which mirrors contemporary concerns about urban illegibility and illegitimate social promotion. Chapter 3 explores a competing tradition which portrayed convicts as sublime, betraying the ambiguity of nineteenth-century attitudes to imprisonment, which could be a sign of infamy or of martyrdom. Sublime convicts reassured readers about the human ability to overcome trials, and to attain salvation through spiritual means (ataraxia) or physical resistance (escape). These differing traditions show that narratives tended to be centred upon their readers’ concerns, which may explain why criminals themselves were discouraged from writing. Chapter 4 presents the obstacles to convict self-expression as well as various attempts by inmates to ‘write back’, culminating with Genet’s and Charrière’s subversive reappropriation of literary discourse. Chapter 5 examines the ways in which the interplay between political events, commercial imperatives, literary evolutions (the rise of the detective novel) and new cultural practices like the cinema changed twentieth-century representations of convicts. This thesis analyses a large corpus of understudied material and fills a gap in existing scholarship, but more importantly it uses convicts to explore nineteenth-century reading practices, and to probe cultural fault lines in post-revolutionary French society. Convicts exemplify the ambiguity of nineteenth-century attitudes to social marginality, and highlight the conflicted nature of bourgeois identity. Their portrayal also draws attention to the important structural changes undergone by the literary field from the 1830s onwards, which paved the way for the advent of mass culture in the twentieth century.