Shelley Godsland – författare

An innovative and best-selling addition to contemporary peninsular literature, crime fiction by Spanish women re-writes the norms for this particular genre as established by male authors inside Spain, and revises and re-fashions paradigms for the detective novel produced by female Anglophone writers. In the first of three chapters, the author shows how the figure of the female sleuth has been deployed by novelists to articulate a feminist ideology or to reflect on the contemporary Spanish post-feminist environment. With reference to gendered criminology, she then moves on to discuss how writers use crime fiction to investigate the problem of gendered violence, and women's responses to it. A final section shows how, in Catalonia, female authors have used both the thriller and the 'cosy' enigma-style detective text to foreground and interrogate the parallel exploitation of women and the Catalan nation.

Although Spain has one of the lowest per capita rates of book buying in Europe, popular and mass-market print fiction is perennially in demand. The essays in this volume assess the appeal of popular genres such as the detective novel, romance, and science fiction to particular groups of readers and consider what makes a bestseller in the Spanish context. They look at how reader taste is directed by nonacademic book-buying magazines and analyze the political intentions of seemingly innocuous comics and popular novels with particular reference to women's writing. Chapters also consider how and why "canonical" writers like Manuel Vasquez Montalban, Esther Tusquets, or Carmen Martin Gaite decide to incorporate the themes, devices, and structures of mass cultural products into their "highbrow" literature. The wide-ranging nature of this volume and its fusion of textual analysis and theoretical overview provide unique access to aspects of Spanish mass, popular, and "high" literature hitherto largely ignored by the critics. Shelley Godsland is Jubilee Research Fellow, Department of Hispanic Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London.Nickiane Moody is principal lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Liverpool John Moores University.