“On Edge is exactly what scholarship should be. Lawson convincingly unpacks the biases of gender and genre at midcentury and proves that Jackson, Highsmith, and Brackett experimented with, and at times subversively transformed, popular genres. She reveals to readers the undercurrent of feminist concerns in genres more often remembered for the stifling of such concerns.” —Margaret Reid, author of Cultural Secrets as Narrative Form: Storytelling in Nineteenth-Century America
“Lawson compellingly reassesses the importance of ‘low’ literary forms such as woman-authored gothic, suspense, and science fiction, arguing for gender as its own meaningful genre and illustrating the ways that these authors answered serious intellectual questions—and leave a memorable literary legacy.” —Jacqueline Foertsch, author of Freedom’s Ring: Literatures of Liberation from Civil Rights to the Second Wave