Ok, here's a question. Recently there has been a fairly rabid debate raging over the genre of 'post-feminist fiction', or chick-lit. It's caused a lot of controversy, and there's a bit of a schism in the publishers' and readers' camps over it. So, here's my question; Chick-Lit, light-hearted alternative to 'proper' fiction, or vacuous derogatory trash???

Discuss.

is there a wikipedia article that can inform me enough to participate in this discussion?

Any term that has the word chick in it is to be taken very seriously.

uno momento, my good man...

"Chick lit" is a term used to denote genre fiction written for and marketed to young women, especially single, working women in their twenties and thirties. The genre's creation was spurred on, if not exactly created, by Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole diaries which inspired Adele Lang's Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber: The Katya Livingston Chronicles in the mid-1990s. Another strong early influence can be seen in the books by M. C. Beaton about Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth. The style can also be seen to be somewhat influenced by female teen angst movies like Sixteen Candles and Clueless. Later with the appearance of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and similar works; the genre continued to sell well in the 2000s, with chick lit titles topping bestseller lists and the creation of imprints devoted entirely to chick lit.

The genre
Chick lit features hip, stylish female protagonists, usually in their twenties and thirties, in urban settings (usually London or Manhattan), and follows their love lives and struggles for professional success (often in the publishing, advertising, public relations or fashion industry). The books usually feature an airy, irreverent tone and frank sexual themes. The genre spawned Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City and its accompanying television series. Popular Chick lit novelists include Ireland's Marian Keyes, and Sophie Kinsella author of the Shopaholic series. Variations have developed to appeal to specific audiences, such as "Chica Lit," aimed at English-dominant, middle-class American Latinas, the top-seller being novelist and film writer/producer Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez; Christian Chick Lit, Matron Lit (aka Hen Lit) for middle-aged women, Young Adult Chick Lit (also Teen Lit), and the novels of Emmy-winning author Lori Bryant-Woolridge, known for her chick lit novels (Read Between the Lies, Hitts and Mrs., Mourning Glo) written specifically with women of color in mind.


Connotations of the term "chick lit""Chick" is an American slang term for young woman and "Lit" is short for "literature". In the USA, the term "chicklit" is also a pun on Chiclets, a popular brand of chewing gum in the USA.

However, the genre has also been claimed as a type of post-feminist fiction which covers the breadth of the female experience which deals unconventionally with traditional romantic themes of love, courtship and gender.

The male equivalent, spearheaded by authors like Ben Elton, Mike Gayle, and Nick Hornby, has been referred to as "lad lit" and "dick lit".

One of the first uses of the term was in the title of the 1995 anthology Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction, edited by Cris Mazza and Jeffrey DeShell. The work in this anthology was not chick lit as we know it today, and the term was used ironically. However James Wolcott's 1996 article in The New Yorker "Hear Me Purr" co-opted "chick lit" to define the trend of "girlishness" evident in the writing of female newspaper columnists at that time. This is significant, as major chick lit works such as Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City originated in such columns. With the success of Bridget Jones and Sex and the City in book form, the chick lit boom began. The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank is regarded as one of the first chick lit works to originate as a novel (actually a collection of stories), though the term "chick lit" was in common use at the time of its publication (1999). The term "chick lit" was in general use by 2000-2001.

The variant "chic lit" has recently been used for works such as Plum Sykes's Bergdorf Blondes (2004), set in the world of fashionable East Coast Society.

Another term is "Chiction" (sometimes "Chicktion"), which first came into wider use in 2006. It has a similar connotation (fiction with romantic themes), but is not restricted to modern literature, so it can apply to classic novels from Jane Austen onwards.


Quotations about chick lit
"To suggest that another woman's ostensibly literary novel is chick lit feels catty, not unlike calling another woman a slut -- doesn't the term basically bring down all of us?" -- Curtis Sittenfeld in the New York Times [1]

"Chick lit claims to be representative of women’s lives, their hopes, fears, dreams and values. But it’s actually about white, upper-middle-class American and Western European women. Chick-lit defenders like to point out that there is black and Latina chick lit, chick lit for older women, but this is all tokenism—a chance for women of every color and age to be portrayed as annoying, shallow twits. Just like George W. claims to be a regular Joe, chick lit claims to be the story of the Everywoman, when really, it’s the story of Some Women of a Certain Class. Which is pretty ironic, given that chick-lit authors cry elitism more often than their characters accidentally trip on their own designer shoes and fall into tall, handsome strangers." -- Anonymous Chick lit editor in Boston's Weekly Dig [2]


Major scandals
In April 2006, 19-year-old Harvard College sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan faced a major scandal when it was discovered that her chick lit novel "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life", published by Little, Brown and Co. had lifted major portions from several other chick lit books, most notably Megan McCafferty’s "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings". Plagiarized passages were also found of Salman Rushdie's and Meg Cabot's work. Significantly, Kaavya had received a $500,000 advance for her first book, with plans for another. Her publishers were so embarrassed that on May 4, 2006, they recalled all unsold copies of the book with plans to destroy them, and called off the second book deal. The movie studio also stopped pre-production and dropped her movie project based on the book.


Movie adaptations
Bridget Jones's Diary
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
The Devil Wears Prada
The Girls' Guide to Hunting And Fishing
The Nanny Diaries
Prep
In Her Shoes
The Dirty Girls Social Club

Brokeback to the Future.

seems like lifetime network: it's for women, but not really helpful for women

well does anyone have a particularly strong view on this?? *sighs* maybe RM is the wrong place to be doing research for a college dissertation...

i don't have a strong view on it cause it affects me so little... the whole effect this writing has had on me, is hearing some guy friends talk about how sex and the city is actally a pretty good show, when i've seen it, and its nothing i'd spend my time watching, and then this thread on RM... other than that there is it hardly makes a dent in my consciousness. so i'd say don't research on rm, unless you're writing about a collection of eccentric internet people who may or may not exist beyond their worded opinions

thanks...

Methinks I should find some chicks to talk to about chick lit...

are you going to be talking about female authors that aren't regarded as "chick-lit?"

you mean in the thread, or the dissertation??

I don't think I've ever read any of the authors you mention, but I'm pretty sure at least one of my older sisters reads this kind of writing on a regular basis.

Personally, I wouldn't call it chick lit, I'd call it something like - dumb people lit.

either... you could spur discussion up in this piece right here

I'd have more interest in the subject if it were labelled 'Clit Lit' as opposed to 'Chick Lit.'

let's just call it C.Lit from now on

Don't you mean Sodomy Lit, Frank??

So malice I presume you're in the anti-C.Lit camp then?? (heehee, anti-clit, heeheehee...so very easily amused...) Can you explain why??

Personally I believe that Chick Lit takes valuable shelf-space away from new 'serious' female writers...I think it buys into this notion of women only being interested in finding a guy, and looking good. The argument put forward by Chick Lit writers is that they're addressing the real-world problems and issues that concern modern women in an escapist, feel-good, lighthearted fashion. I don't know about other girls, but my problems have never been solved by buying new shoes, and I don't know a single woman out there that's found her 'dream guy' and lived happily ever after. I think there's a preoccupation with capitalist materialistic themes in these books, and to put it bluntly, they don't do a whole lot for a perception of modern women as intelligent capable human beings. I think whatever strides were made by the feminist movement in finding equal intellectual ground between men and women are being undone by these books; they're saying women don't want to read serious literary material, they want fluff, because it's easier for them to digest. They're saying that the Cecelia Aherns and Marian Keyes of the world are on the same literary level as the John Banvilles and the Marcus Zusaks; but they're more suitable for women because they deal with the 'realities' of the feminine world. Bollocks. Plus, as a 'serious' female writer, I resent the fact that publication is becoming harder because of these women - no publisher in the world is going to take a risk on an unknown writer's piece of prose that may not sell well, if they have a Chick Lit-er writing some vacuous piece of pink fluff that will no doubt become a best seller. Chick Lit devalues women writers as a whole - why spend years crafting a finely-written piece of prose which may vanish into obscurity when you can write the intellectual equivalent of a grocery list and make a fast buck??

i find feminists really attractive

Shut up Andy...*headbutts you with the feminist buzzcut*

Never read it, but it does seem to be vacuous tosh. Like the sort of stuff you'd get free with an issue of Cosmo. Ms. Felicity Cockswallower has been searching for Mr. Right for ages! Then, one night out with the gals, she discovers Dr. Hugh-Cock, a dashing young surgeon who rebuffs her but hides a tragic past that only she can heal! What will happen? Will they get together? Do you care? You'd better enjoy the book before your ovaries dry up and that biological clock is ticking...