Abstract
Two genres, the female Künstlerroman and the detective novel, intersect in Louise Fitzhugh’s 1964 Harriet the Spy, recasting the development of a girl writer as a tale of unfolding mystery. The mystery that Harriet encounters in the course of her spying activities is one of personal identity: how does one make sense of the complex interaction between individual existence and community? While the Bildungsroman traditionally traces a young person’s development, and the even more specifically focused Künstlerroman traces the development of an artist, as exemplified in the female tradition by Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), detective stories for girls have stood at the opposite pole. These novels, such as the famous Nancy Drew series, rarely allow their protagonists to change or mature. The mysteries their sleuths face are outside of themselves: their own identities are never in question. However, because of the generic conventions involving crime and discovery, they can offer a vision of an independent, active female that the more mundane Künstlerroman cannot.
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© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Morris, R.A. (2001). The Secret Development of a Girl Writer: Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy. In: Gavin, A.E., Routledge, C. (eds) Mystery in Children’s Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985137_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985137_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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