Killing Like a Girl: The Autobiographical Self-Fashioning of Female Hunters in Contemporary European Literature

The popularization of New Nature Writing and ecocritical reflections in the European book market since the turn of the millennium has been accompanied by the publication of an increasing number of autobiographical books about hunting, among them books that have received significant critical acclaim (like Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk). Many of these texts are written by female authors, which, at first glance, seems to unsettle the long-lived association of hunting with masculinity. This chapter explores the ways in which female hunters in contemporary European (nonfiction) literature relate to this presumed “outsider” status and engage with the gender politics of hunting as well as its semantics. The exploration of this topic—in terms of both content and aesthetics—promises a deeper understanding of the role literature plays in shaping our understanding of categories such as “nature” and “culture,” “human” and “animal.”