This book offers readers a concise look at over a century of femmes fatales on both the silver screen and the TV screen, from Theda Bara and Barbara Stanwyck to Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh, considering how this figure embodies Hollywood’s contradictory attitudes toward female ambition, independence, and sexuality.

JULIE GROSSMAN is a professor of English and communication and film studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. Her books about film, television, literature, and gender include Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition (with Therese Grisham), Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up, Adaptation and ElasTEXTity: Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny, and Twin Peaks (with Will Scheibel).
 

Contents
Introduction
1          "Theda Bara and Barbara Stanwyck's "Baby Face": Exoticism and the Street-Smart Vamp"
2          Wartime and Postwar Film Noir, Neo-Noir, and the Femme Fatale
3          Tracy Flick, and Television's Unruly Women
Acknowledgements
Further Reading
Works Cited
Selected Filmography
Index