I can say this for Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction: Jane Austen, Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’s Diary), and Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City) get top billing. This apparent holy trinity of chick lit is invoked in some combination by every contributor in this volume. Unfortunately, this becomes overwhelming as you move through the book and, for me, clouded the work as a whole. Not that I don’t love Jane Austen, and I was amused by Bridget Jones’s Diary and Sex and the City, but I felt like I was being beaten over the head by the constant comparison of chick lit to this trinity and the lesser historic pantheon of women’s popular fiction.
This anthology looks at one of the latest genres of popular fiction--chick lit. More than romance novels of the Harlequin variety (although Harlequin has its own chick lit imprint, Red Dress Ink) but not quite paperback fiction, the women in these novels try to balance career, social life, and romance. The stories do not necessarily culminate in marriage or the typical happily-ever-after we have come to expect from romance novels. The intent is to better reflect the lives of “real” women as comic, tragic, and always changing.
Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction attempts to ground this body of work in the history of women’s literature (that is, literature by and for women) while also paying attention to profit-driven publishing markets, subgenres such as Southern chick lit, and the lives of women. While each article tends to invoke the Holy Chick Lit Trinity, each does cover a different aspect of the genre and, taken individually, offers interesting grounds to explore.
Each chapter looks at a different aspect of chick lit, from a short history of the genre to representations in film to the role of body consciousness in plots. The most interesting chapters deal with racial and geographic subgenres such as chick lit for African American women, Southern chick lit, and most interestingly, Hungarian chick lit. These chapters present the ways in which this genre can adapt and occupy a wider market niche. I found “Bridget Jones and Hungarian Chick Lit” by Nóra Séllei to be the most compelling chapter, pointing out that Hungarian chick lit modifies the standard chick lit situation (single woman living alone) to accommodate the reality of Hungarian life for single women (unable to afford to live alone) as well as other cultural differences.
Does Chick Lit accomplish its goal of finding a place for the genre within the history of women’s popular fiction? Yes, it does. Even though the overall work suffers from repetition of the same founding mothers, individually each chapter covers some fascinating material. The chapters cover history as well as cultural, racial, and geographic subgenres; some also deal with the fallacies and stereotypes represented in many of the plots (class and economic issues in books like The Nanny Diaries or The Devil Wears Prada or weight issues in Bridget Jones’s Diary and Jemima J). The scholarship is sound, if a bit repetitive.
This work joins a growing body of scholarship on the topic of modern women’s romance fiction that was started in 1991 with Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance. While I would never use this book in its totality in a course, I would definitely use chapters on specific topics.
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[Review length: 552 words • Review posted on January 30, 2008]