Abstract
This article will analyze how Tana French conceptualizes spatiality, focusing on her use of liminal spaces, edgelands and peripheries, as the settings for her crime scenes. Instead of more traditional Irish literary urban-rural binaries, French exploits the interface of both places, reflecting a contemporary post-industrial, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. In particular, in In the Woods (2007) the untamed woodland behind the housing estate in Knocknaree becomes an interfacial zone between the rural and urban, past and present. In The Likeness (2009), Whitethorn House sits at the edge of the village geographically, politically, and historically. In French’s first two novels peripheral spaces offer a mysterious point of departure, allowing her to delve deeper into the multiple layers of meaning evoked by marginal spaces.
Recommended Citation
Flynn, Deirdre.
"Crime on the Periphery: Tana French’s Criminal Geography,"
Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies, vol. 4,
no.
1,
2022,
https://scholarship.shu.edu/ciiis/vol4/iss1/2.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.70531/2576-6414.1013
Included in
Celtic Studies Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, History Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, Women's Studies Commons
