Criminal Femmes Fatales in American Hardboiled Crime Fiction

Maysaa Husam Jaber is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Baghdad, Iraq. She was a fellow in The University of Massachusetts Boston, USA from September to November 2013. She has published with Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge Scholars Publishing and the Arab World English Journal.

Introduction 1. The 'Mad-Bad' Criminal Woman PART I: PRE-WAR CRIMINAL FEMMES FATALES 2. Narratives of the Underworld: Violence and Dangerous Femininity in Dashiell Hammett's Labyrinthine Criminal World 3. Narratives of Detection: Femme Fatality and the Detective 'Hero' in Raymond Chandler's Fiction 4. Narratives of Seduction: The Criminal Femme Fatale and the 'forbidden box' in James M. Cain PART II: POST-WAR CRIMINAL FEMMES FATALES 5. Crime, Sex and Paranoia in Post-War Hardboiled Fiction 6. The Duality of David Goodis's Criminal Femmes Fatales 7. Mickey Spillane's Criminal Femmes Fatales and the Cold War Vendetta Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index