Customer Reviews

Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As one who had never heard the term Chick Lit before reading reviews of Emily Barr's "Backpack," I gotta thank Ferriss, Young, and their 14 contributors for 'splaining it to me. Some of the essays, like those by Mazza and Guerrero, make critical points with style and wit worth reading for themselves. But even the essay that reads like a dissertation chapter and the structuralist analysis help define Chick Lit and relate it not just to classics by Burney and Austen but also to chronologically closer predecessors by Atwood, Bombeck, Jong, Acker and others.

I admired the rather sour take on the genre by Wells, who backs up her criticism with comparisons of the craft of foremothers Austen, Bronte and Wharton with Fielding, Weisberger and Kinsella. Not that I agree with her, but it is refreshing to have an articulate naysayer in the collection of essays.

Most of the essayists use comparison well, but Kiernan's "No Satisfaction: Sex and the City, Run Catch Kiss, and the Conflict of Desires in Chick Lit's New Heroines" shows very clearly why Sohn's novel is a more disturbing read.

The index is excellent. It's easy to see that authors Fielding and Austen get the most refs, but what really help are the subheadings under the term "chick lit." Since Amazon doesn't have LOOK INSIDE for this edition at present, here are some of the subheadings: "female friendships and," "genre's formula, discussion of," "confessional narrative (instant messaging) style,"--very useful!

So does the publication of a scholarly but lively collection of essays mark the end of this genre (yeah, what ever happened to cyberpunk?)? I doubt it. Ferriss and Young's book convinced me that there has been a sea-change in contemporary fiction and provided a ton of new titles to read.