Dangerous visions? The circulation and translation of women’s crime fiction and science fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACTCrime fiction and science fiction (SF) have long been associated with male writers and readers. Typically, in these popular genres the main characters have been men, while women have been mostly represented in a traditional way. This changed when, in the 1970s and early 1980s, a number of women writers appropriated these forms of popular fiction, subverting their conventional elements and introducing heroines and themes that had a strong feminist character. Since a number of these texts were also translated into Italian, the question I want to consider is to what extent these gender-based innovations in crime fiction and SF were represented in the Italian versions, at a time when Italy was going through remarkable transformations, in relation to the role of women in the family and society. In this article I explore this issue by analysing the way in which subversive models of female identity in a corpus of English crime fiction and SF were introduced and translated into Italian. The results show that while most of these texts were allowed entrance into the Italian cultural space, a number became the site of gendered discourses, affecting both the paratextual and the textual levels.