Chick Lit

Suzanne Ferriss is Professor of English at Nova Southeastern University. She is co-author of A Handbookof Literary Feminisms and co-editor of two volumes on the cultural study of fashion: On Fashion and Footnotes: OnShoes.Mallory Young is Professor of English and French at Tarleton State University.

"'The damned mob of scribbling women,' as Nathaniel Hawthorne labeled them, is at it again. Women writers have created a new genre called 'chick lit' that is ruffling the feathers of the literary establishment. In this pioneering book female critics take a serious look at what the genre has begotten thus far and consider its place in literary history, which has long cast a dubious eye on books written by women solely to please themselves and other women." -- Tania Modleski, author of Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women"Ferris and Young have put together a volume of intelligent, insightful, readable essays that go beyond current positive/negative judgments of chick lit to critically dissect its importance as cultural and historical phenomenon. While the fiction itself may pass for light entertainment, these analyses extract from its pages the serious, even discomfiting, issues that make its enormous readership of (mostly) young, post-feminist women such devoted fans. Scholars, students, and chick lit fans themselves will find in this book much to ponder and discuss." -- Leslie W. Rabine, author of Reading the Romantic Heroine and The Global Circulation of African Fashion"Chick Lit: the New Women's Fiction offers a timely analysis of a new genre. With its scholarly approach and accessible style, it offers rich possibilities as a classroom text. Teachers of contemporary literature will value its discussions of generic traits and of relationships to canonized women writers including Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and the Brontës. For cultural studies classrooms, it offers intriguing-and multicultural-meditations on commodity culture, body image, and postfeminism." -- Carol M. Dole, Professor of English, Ursinus College"This work, rich and interesting from many points of view, has the merit of being the first to raise the curtain, without disdain or prejudice, on a new cultural product, a true media phenomenon that is still growing and shouldn't be overlooked." - Belphegor (translated from French)

• Acknowledgments Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, Introduction The Hatching of a Genre: Origins and Influences Cris Mazza, Tome of the Unknown Chick: A Short History of Chick-Lit and the Perversion of a Genre Stephanie Harzewski, Tradition and Displacement in the New Novel of Manners Juliette Wells, Mothers of Chick Lit?: Women Writers, Readers, and Literary History Suzanne Ferriss, Narrative and Cinematic Doubleness: Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones's Diary Free Range: Varieties and Variations Lisa A. Guerrero, 'Sistahs Are Doin' It for Themselves': Chick Lit in Black and White Elizabeth Hale, Long-Suffering Professional Females: The Case of Nanny-Lit Heather Hewett, You Are Not Alone: The Personal, the Political, and the 'New' Mommy Lit Joanna Webb Johnson, Chick Lit Jr.: More Than Just Glitz and Glamour for Teens and Tweens Elizabeth B. Boyd, Ya Yas, Grits and Sweet Potato Queens: Contemporary Southern Belles and the Prescriptions That Guide Them Nóra Séllei, Bridget Jones and Hungarian Chick Lit Sex and the Single Chick: Feminism and Postfeminism, Sexuality and Self-Fashioning A. Rochelle Mabry, About a Girl: Female Subjectivity and Sexuality in Contemporary 'Chick' Culture Anna Kiernan, No Satisfaction: Sex and the City, Run Catch Kiss, and the Conflict of Desires in Chick Lit's New Heroines Jessica Lyn Van Slooten, Fashionably Indebted: Fashion, Romance, and Conspicuous Consumption in Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic Trilogy Alison Umminger, Super-Sizing Bridget Jones: What's Really Eating the Women in Chick Lit Shari Benstock, Afterword Selected Bibliography Contributors' Notes