This multidisciplinary collection of articles illuminates the ways in which the concept of female deviance is represented, appropriated, re-inscribed and refigured in a wide range of texts across time, cultures and genres. Such a choice of variety shows that representations of deviance accommodate meaning-making spaces and possibilities for resistance in different socio-cultural and literary contexts. The construct of the deviant woman is analysed from literary, sociolinguistic and historical-cultural perspectives, revealing insights about cultures and societies. Furthermore, the studies recognise and explain the significance of the concept of deviance in relation to gender that bespeaks a contemporary cultural concern about narratives of femininity.

Tiina Mäntymäki, Marinella Rodi -Risberg, Anna Foka: "Introduction" 9 // Anna Foka: "Beyond Deviant: Theodora as the Other in Byzantine Imperial Historiography" 29 // Wang Lei: "Ghosts and Spirits as the objet a in Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from Make -Do Studio" 49 // Sanna Karkulehto and Ilmari Leppihalme: "Deviant Will to Knowledge: The Pandora Myth and Its Feminist Revisions" 69 // Tiina Mäntymäki: "Carnivalesque Masquerade. Lisbeth Salander and Her Trickster Agency" 93 // Marinella Rodi -Risberg: "Trauma and Contextual Factors in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees: Incest, Race and Gendered Subjectivities" 113 // Caroline Enberg: "‘Baby Killer!’ – Media Constructions of a Culturally Congruent Identity for Casey Anthony as Mother and Female Offender" 135 // Maj-Britt Höglund: "The Absent Female Rotarian in Finland: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Rotary Norden" 153 // Anka Ryall: "A Deviant in the Arctic" 171 // Gerald Porter: "‘Foremost in Violence and Ferocity’: Women Singing at Work in Britain" 191 // Róisín Ní Ghallóglaigh and Sandra Joyce: "‘Threshing in the Haggard to her Heart’s Delight’: Women and Erotic Expression in Irish Traditional Song" 211 //