Splattered Ink: Postfeminist Gothic Fiction and Gendered Violence

"Postfeminist cultural studies has largely been focused on film, television, and other forms of mass media, with the occasional foray into the the lighthearted romantic comedy fiction known as "chick lit." In this project, the author seeks to trace a darker literary thread in contemporary U.S. women's fiction: that which exemplifies the postfeminist gothic, a genre which harnesses gothic themes and motifs to tell stories of gendered violence and pain. Whitney suggests that the novels of the popular authors in this study - Alice Sebold, Susanna Moore, Sapphire, Patricia Cornwell and Jodi Picoult - intrude violently upon the well-constructed postfeminist fantasy of a safe and equitable world at the same time that they reject victimhood as an organizing identity. The author argues that a variety of narrative strategies that jar readers, refuse to provide happy endings, and question the inevitability of crime against women in a supposedly "equitable" world provide new ways of continuing to talk about sexual and domestic violence. Whitney's attention to the literary expression of this powerful cultural motif helps to illuminate the workings of gendered violence in the contemporary U.S. cultural imagination"--