Rape in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Beyond: Contemporary Scandinavian and Anglophone Crime Fiction PDF
Preview Rape in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Beyond: Contemporary Scandinavian and Anglophone Crime Fiction
Rape in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Beyond Also by Berit Åström T HE POLITICS OF TRADITION: Examining the History of the Old English Poems the Wife’s Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer Also by Katarina Gregersdotter WATCHING WOMEN, FALLING WOMEN: A Reading of Margaret Atwood’s Friendship Trilogy A lso by Tanya Horeck THE NEW EXTREMISM IN CINEMA: From France to Europe ( co-edited with Tina Kendall ) PUBLIC RAPE: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film Rape in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Beyond Contemporary Scandinavian and Anglophone Crime Fiction Edited by Berit Åström Senior Lecturer, Umeå University, Sweden Katarina Gregersdotter Senior Lecturer, Umeå University, Sweden and Tanya Horeck Senior Lecturer, Anglia Ruskin University, UK Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Berit Åström, Katarina Gregersdotter and Tanya Horeck 2013 Individual chapters © Contributors 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-30840-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-1-349-33898-6 ISBN 978-1-137-29163-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137291639 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on Contributors ix Introduction 1 Tanya Horeck, Katarina Gregersdotter, and Berit Åström Part I Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy: Opening up the Debate 1 ‘The Girl Who Pays Our Salaries’: Rape and the Bestselling Millennium Trilogy 21 Priscilla Walton 2 The Millennium Trilogy and the American Serial Killer Narrative: Investigating Protagonists of Men Who Write Women 34 Barbara Fister 3 Lisbeth Salander as a Melodramatic Heroine: Emotional Conflicts, Split Focalization, and Changing Roles in Scandinavian Crime Fiction 51 Yvonne Leffler Part II Dismembered Bodies, Wounded States: Gender Politics in the Millennium Trilogy and Beyond 4 Rape and the Avenging Female in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Håkan Nesser’s Woman with Birthmark and The Inspector and Silence 67 Marla Harris 5 The Body, Hopelessness, and Nostalgia: Representations of Rape and the Welfare State in Swedish Crime Fiction 8 1 Katarina Gregersdotter 6 Over Her Dismembered Body: The Crime Fiction of Mo Hayder and Jo Nesbø 97 Berit Åström v vi Contents Part III Rewriting Scripts: Language, Gender, and Violence in Contemporary Crime Fiction 7 Disarticulated Figures: Language and Sexual Violence in Contemporary Crime Fiction 117 Meghan A. Freeman 8 Male Fantasy, Sexual Exploitation, and the Femme Fatale : Reframing Scripts of Power and Gender in Neo- noir Novels by Sara Paretsky, Megan Abbott and Stieg Larsson 136 Zoë Brigley Thompson Part IV Ethics, Violence, and Adaptation 9 Rape and Replay in Stieg Larsson, Liza Marklund, and Val McDermid: On Affect, Ethics, and Feeling Bad 157 Tanya Horeck 10 T he Girl with the Dragon Tattoo : Rape, Revenge, and Victimhood in Cinematic Translation 175 Claire Henry 11 ‘ Hidden in the Snow’: Female Violence against the Men Who Hate Women in the Millennium Adaptations 193 Philippa Gates Index 215 Acknowledgements In a book that seeks to open up a dialogue between Scandinavian and Anglophone crime fiction, it seems important to acknowledge our own cultural location as authors. Two of us (Berit and Katarina) are Swedish and work at Umeå University, while the other (Tanya) is Canadian/ British and works at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK. All three of us share an interest in contemporary crime fiction, and we came together for this project to see what kinds of questions we could open up about the status of violence in crime novels through a cross-cultural approach. Working across cultures – and languages – has thrown up a series of interesting challenges and has made each of us re-evaluate our views on violence in the crime novel and the ways in which we encounter it. The results have been more fascinating and engaging than we could have hoped for. We would first of all like to say a heartfelt thank you to our wonderful contributors, who come from Australia, Canada, the US, Sweden, and the UK. Each and every one of you rose to the challenge of exploring how your own research on sexual violence and crime novels relates to the intriguing cultural phenomenon that is Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. We would also like to thank Palgrave Macmillan, and in particular Felicity Plester, for seeing the potential of this project in its early stages, and Catherine Mitchell for answering our questions so patiently. Thanks also to the anonymous reader of our original book proposal, whose suggestions on narrowing the focus proved to be very astute. We could not have completed this work without the support of our respective institutions: thanks to Anglia Ruskin University for providing Tanya with a sabbatical during which she was able to complete the project and to Umeå Centre for Gender Studies, and in particular Annelie Bränström Öhman, for providing Katarina and Berit with much appreciated research time. Many other people helped along the way: thanks to Tina Kendall, still the best ‘reader’ in the business, who gave critical input at a crucial stage; Milla Tiainen for offering her ever intellectually astute and perceptive thoughts; Lisa Coulthard, Mary Joannou, Joss Hands, and Sarah Barrow for their support; Peter Messent for valuable and clever comments on an early draft; and Heidi Hansson for reading and asking difficult questions. Special thanks to Barbara Fister for being such a fantastic font of information on all things to do vii viii Acknowledgements with crime fiction, and to Philippa Gates and Zoë Brigley Thompson for their wonderfully incisive and helpful suggestions. Finally, for all their support through the long winter months of writing and editing, we would like to thank our families: Patrick and Michael Yates, Liv Enqvist and Nicklas Hållén, and Hugh, Grace, and Edward Perry. Contributors Berit Åström is Senior Lecturer in English at Umeå University, Sweden. Her work spans centuries and genres, from Old English love poetry, to contemporary crime and science fiction, to male pregnancy fan fiction. In 2011–2012 she was visiting scholar at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, where she held an Intra-European Fellowship from Marie Curie Actions, Seventh Framework Programme, for a project called ‘Transhistorical Tropes of Female Subordination’, which investi- gates the recurring trope of dead and absent mothers in Western litera- ture, from antiquity to the present day. Zoë Brigley Thompson is Lecturer in English and Creative Writing. She is a reader for the journal O rbis Litterarum and for the Routledge/Taylor and Francis database ABES (The Annotated Bibliography of English Studies). She has published the edited collection Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: V iolence and V iolation (2010), which also features her essays ‘Introduction: Transnational Feminism(s) and Rape Scripts’ and ‘The Wound and the Mask: Rape, Recovery and Poetry’. She has also published a collection of poetry T he Secret (2007). Barbara F ister is an academic librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota and the author of a guide to women’s literature from the third world as well as three mysteries, the most recent of which is Through the Cracks (2010). She maintains a website on Scandinavian crime fiction in English translation and writes about academic libraries for Library Journal and Inside Higher Ed. Meghan A. Freeman received her doctorate in Victorian literature from Cornell University and is currently employed as an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of English at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her current project concerns the representation of aesthetic experience in the nineteenth-century novel, with a particular emphasis on how this experience is refracted through the lens of gender and sexuality. She has taught courses on Victorian literature and culture, mystery and crime writing, as well as women’s literature. Philippa Gates is Associate Professor in Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. Her publications include Detecting Women: G ender ix
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