Since the late 1970s, a subgenre of crime fiction, written by women and featuring a professional woman investigator, has exploded on the popular fiction market. Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones focus on this recent proliferation of women writers of detective fiction, providing the first book-length study of the historical and societal changes that fueled this popularity, along with insightful and entertaining readings of the texts themselves.

Walton and Jones place the genre within its aesthetic, social, and economic contexts, reading it as an index of cultural beliefs. Addressing the...

Claiming the "ordinary" and "extra-ordinary" as critical categories, contributors to this volume explore the philosophical and literary import of Carol Shields's writing, its complex play with genre and narrative technique, its re-valuing of domesticity and gendered perspective, and the social critique implicit in its gentle satirical impulses. Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary begins with a previously unpublished article by Shields. In the essays that follow, international scholars employ a variety of theories and methodologies in their analyses of her work, including narrative theory,...