The author offers a scholarly dissection of "chick lit" from a post-feminist perspective. She analyzes the novel Bridget Jones' Diary and the HBO series Sex and the City while making parallels back to writings of Jane Austen and the Victorian novel in general. She looks at what these works say about women in society and whether they are just an escape or a serious reflection of women's concerns.

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

Chick lit is the marketing label attributed to a surge of books published in the wake of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City (1997). Branded by their pink or pastel-coloured book covers, chick-lit novels have been a highly successful and ubiquitous product of women's popular culture since the late 1990s. This study traces the evolution of chick lit not only as a genre of popular fiction, but as a cultural phenomenon. It complicates the genealogy of the texts by situating them firmly in the context of age-old debates about female literary creation, and by highlighting the dynamics of the popular-fiction market. Offering a convincing dissection of the formula which lies at the heart of chick lit, as well as in-depth analyses of a number of chick-lit titles ranging from classic to more recent and edgier texts, this book yields new insights into a relatively young field of academic study. Its close readings provide astute assessments of chick lit's notoriously skewed representational politics, especially with regard to sexuality and ethnicity, which feed into current discussions about postfeminism. Moreover, the study makes a unique contribution to the scholarly debate of chick lit by including an analysis of the (online) fan communities the genre has fostered. The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit weaves a sound methodological network, drawing on reader-response criticism; feminist, gender, and queer theory; affect studies; and whiteness studies. This book is an accessible and engaging study for anyone interested in postfeminism and popular culture.

Postfeminism in Context studies the representation of women in Australian popular culture over the past three decades to locate postfeminism in a specific time and place. Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor argue that ‘postfeminism’, as a critical term, has been too often deployed in ways that fail to account for historical and cultural specificity. This book analyses Australian popular culture – chick lit novels; ‘dramedy’ television shows; women’s magazines; YouTube beauty vlogs; self-help manuals; and newspapers – to reveal the tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that have always been constitutive of postfeminism, including in Australia. Examining how these popular forms intervene in dominant conversations about contemporary Australian femininities, Postfeminism in Context maps the ways in which various aspects of Australia’s history and national identity have shaped its postfeminism. While Henderson and Taylor identify some of the limited postfeminist tropes and patterns of representation evident in comparable locales, they also find that Australian popular culture has responded to feminism in a much more hopeful way. Adding some much-needed cultural specificity to the ongoing debate around this loaded term, Postfeminism in Context is essential reading for those interested in Australian popular culture, feminism, and the gendered politics of representation.

From the bestselling Bridget Jones's Diary that started the trend to the television sensation Sex and the City that captured it on screen, "chick lit" has become a major pop culture phenomenon. Banking on female audiences' identification with single, urban characters who struggle with the same life challenges, publishers have earned millions and even created separate imprints dedicated to the genre. Not surprisingly, some highbrow critics have dismissed chick lit as trashy fiction, but fans have argued that it is as empowering as it is entertaining. This is the first volume of its kind to examine the chick lit phenomenon from a variety of angles, accounting for both its popularity and the intense reactions-positive and negative-it has provoked. The contributors explore the characteristics that cause readers to attach the moniker "chick" to a particular book and what, if anything, distinguishes the category of chick lit from the works of Jane Austen on one end and Harlequin romance novels on the other. They critique the genre from a range of critical perspectives, considering its conflicted relationship with feminism and postfeminism, heterosexual romance, body image, and consumerism. The fourteen original essays gathered here also explore such trends and subgenres as "Sistah Lit," "Mommy Lit," and "Chick Lit Jr.," as well as regional variations. As the first book to consider the genre seriously, Chick Lit offers real insight into a new generation of women's fiction.

By analyzing the negotiation of femininities and masculinities within contemporary Hollywood cinema, Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema presents diverse interrogations of popular cinema and illustrates the need for a renewed scholarly focus on contemporary film production.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Muslim women writers located in Europe and American entered the cultural mainstream. Literary and visual productions negotiated static visual emblems of Islam, most prominently "the veil." They did so not by rejecting veiling practices, but by adapting Muslim resources, concepts and visual tradition to empowerment narratives in popular media. Mainstream reception of their works has often overlooked or misread these negotiations. Muslim Textualities argues for more flexible and capacious interpretation, with particular attention to visibility as a metaphor for political agency and to knowledge of cultural contexts. This provocative volume aims to articulate Muslim female agency through clear and accessible analysis of the theory and concepts driving the interpretation of these works. Scholars interested in the working representations of Muslim women, feminist subjectivities, and the complexities of gender roles, patriarchy, and feminism will find this volume of particular interest.

Scholars and readers alike need little help identifying the infamous Bridget Jones or Carrie Bradshaw. While it is no stretch to say that these fictional characters are the most recognizable within the chic lit genre, there are certainly many others that have helped define this body of work. While previous research has focused primarily on white American chick lit, Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre, takes a wider look at the genre, by exploring chick lit novels featuring protagonists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds set both within and outside of the US.

The first book length study of the genre of 'chick lit' informed by an advanced stylistic approach, covering tradition and cognitive angles.

This collection expands the body of research on the intersection of gender and translation to highlight perspectives across different countries in Europe, showcasing developments in the field from its origins in the emergence of feminist translation in Quebec over the last thirty years. Building off seminal work on feminist translation by scholars in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s, the book explores the evolution of the discipline in shifting translation practices and research across a range of European countries, with a focus on underrepresented areas such as Malta, Serbia, and Poland. The different chapters examine key developments such as the critical reframing of gender and identity, the viewing of historical translation activity by women through the lens of ideological and political motivations, and the analysis of socio-political contexts where feminist or gender-inspired translation has impacted translators’ practices. The volume looks concurrently at the European context and beyond it, putting the spotlight on new voices in translation and gender research in the region but also encouraging transnational dialogues on key issues in the discipline, pushing the field further into new directions. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in translation studies, gender studies, and European literature.