Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Tana French’s work has been the subject of a number of recent scholars.
Scholarship on French ranges from theories of liminality, to meditations on how French’s
work explores the “Celtic Tiger” phenomenon in Ireland, to looking at her stories as new
takes on old fairy tales. French’s work straddles the line between popular detective fiction
and literary fiction, upending popular tropes and creating something wholly new.
One issue that has not been explored is how French’s work fits into a Lacanian
framework. The six novels in her Dublin Murder Squad detective stories are rife with
issues of psychological mirroring, or doubling. As such, they take the typical mystery
trope of pairing a detective with a case that alters and reflects back their own
psychological traumas, and takes them to a new level.
This work will address issues of French’s characters and how they fit into the
theories of Lacan’s Mirror Stage, as well as the “Real,” “Symbolic,” and “Imaginary”
realms that we human beings unconsciously construct for ourselves. This writing
examines the first two novels of the series, In the Woods, and The Likeness, and analyzes
them in light of these theories, showing how mirroring exists in nearly every aspect of
each text.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:IUPUI/oai:scholarworks.iupui.edu:1805/27247 |
| Date | 12 1900 |
| Creators | Gott-Helton, Sarah Meghan |
| Contributors | Marvin, Thomas, Layden, Sarah, Kirts, Terry |
| Source Sets | Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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