Antiheroines of Contemporary Media: Saints, Sinners, and Survivors - Paperback

by Melanie Haas (Contribution by), Henriette-Juliane Seeliger (Contribution by), Tiara Sukhan (Contribution by)

This volume of essays provides a critical foray into the methods used to construct narratives which foreground antiheroines, a trope which has become increasingly popular within literary media, film, and television. Antiheroine characters engage constructions of motherhood, womanhood, femininity, and selfhood as mediated by the structures that socially prescribe boundaries of gender, sex, and sexuality. Within this collection, scholars of literary, cultural, media, and gender studies address the complications of representing agency, autonomy, and self-determination within narrative texts complicated by age, class, race, sexuality, and a spectrum of privilege that reflects the complexities of scripting women on and off screen, within and beyond the page. This collection offers perspectives on the alternate narratives engendered through the motivations, actions, and agendas of the antiheroine, while engaging with the discourses of how such narratives are employed both as potentially feminist interventions and critiques of access, hierarchy, and power.

Author Biography

Melanie Haas is chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Southeast Arkansas College and is completing her PhD in Rhetoric at Texas Woman's University.
N.A. Pierce is completing her PhD in English Literature at Old Dominion University.
Gretchen Busl is associate professor and graduate program coordinator in the Department of English, Speech, and Foreign Languages at Texas Woman's University.