Women and Film Noir
Women and Film Noir
Pulp Fiction and the Woman’s Picture
This chapter explores the relationship between classic noir and female-authored pulp fiction. Linking noir with its female-authored source material will help reorient gender associations with film noir so that male experience is not its exclusive focus. Moreover, such linkage renders the shared concerns of film noir and melodrama more evident and interprets the relationship between gender and genre more as a dialogue, less as an opportunity to rank texts in terms of an evaluation-laden hierarchy. The chapter then looks at 1940s novels written by women that were brought to the screens as “film noirs.” These works exemplify the nonschematic presence of gender issues in noir and the continuities between the treatment of gender in the genre and the exploration of gender in the source novels.
Keywords: classic noir, female-authored pulp fiction, gender associations, film noir, gender issues
Illinois Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
