The Age of Girls: History and Testimony in Emma Cline's The Girls

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: “The Age of Girls: History and Testimony in Emma Cline’s The Girls” theorizes the “girl” novel as a contemporary literary genre and analyzes The Girls by Emma Cline as an example of this genre. This thesis discusses the rise of the contemporary “girl” novel that resists the "dead girl" and "detective girl" tropes common to the crime fiction genre. The Girls draws upon the historical record of the Manson Family to construct a coming-of-age story for protagonist Evie Boyd. This thesis assesses The Girls as a work of historiographic metafiction narrated by a literary witness and suggests that that this alternative history featuring Evie Boyd as a living female witness to violence not only moves beyond the existing scripts of crime fiction, but actually establishes the “girl” novel subgenre as a space for women’s testimony.

Type of resource	text
Date created	May 2019

Author	Canaan, Reed
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, Department of English
Primary advisor	Elam, Michele
Advisor	Greif, Mark

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/fg428rh8787

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred Citation: Canaan, Reed. (2019). The Age of Girls: History and Testimony in Emma Cline's The Girls. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/fg428rh8787

Stanford University, Department of English, Undergraduate Honors Theses

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