eBook

Chick Lit and Postfeminism

Harzewski, Stephanie

2011

Overview

Originally a euphemism for Princeton University's Female Literary Traditioncourse in the 1980s, \"chick lit\" mutated from a movement in American women'savant-garde fiction in the 1990s to become, by the turn of the century, a humorous subset ofwomen's literature, journalism, and advice manuals. Stephanie Harzewski examines such bestsellers as Bridget Jones's Diary The Devil Wears Prada,and Sex and the City as urban appropriations of and departures from the narrativetraditions of the novel of manners, the popular romance, and the bildungsroman. Further, Harzewskiuses chick lit as a lens through which to view gender relations in U.S. and British society in the1990s. Chick Lit and Postfeminism is the first sustained historicization of thismajor pop-cultural phenomenon, and Harzewski successfully demonstrates how chick lit and thecritical study of it yield social observations on upheavals in Anglo-American marriage andeducation patterns, heterosexual rituals, feminism, and postmodern values.

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Subject: American fiction / Books and reading / Chick lit / Consumption / Consumption (Economics) in literature / Development / English fiction / Feminism / Feminist theory / Fiction / History and criticism / Literary genres / Literary works / Man-woman relationships in literature / Popular culture in literature / Postmodernism / Single women in literature / Social values in literature / Women / Women authors / Writers
• ISBN: 9780813930718, 0813930715