Splattered Ink

Most scholarship on postfeminist culture concentrates on movies, television and other mass media, touching on fiction mainly through light romantic comedies often grouped as chick lit. This study turns to a darker strand of contemporary American women's writing. It examines the postfeminist gothic, where gothic conventions and imagery are used to portray gendered violence and suffering.

The author argues that novels by Alice Sebold, Susanna Moore, Sapphire, Patricia Cornwell and Jodi Picoult break into the polished postfeminist vision of a secure and fair society. These books also decline to define their women by victimhood. Their narrative techniques unsettle readers, withhold tidy resolutions, and challenge the assumption that crimes against women are bound to happen in a world presented as equal.

By tracing these strategies, the book shows how such fiction offers fresh ways to discuss sexual and domestic violence. It is a study of how a powerful cultural motif takes literary form, and of what that form reveals about the place of gendered violence in the modern American imagination.