The New Novel of Manners: Chick Lit and Postfeminist Sexual Politics

The New Novel of Manners: Chick Lit and Postfeminist Sexual Politics
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Published on 2006 by ProQuest

Despite a myopic social vision, these urban period pieces bring to the contemplative tradition of the novel of manners elements of adventure fiction; they extend Jane Austen's comedic legacy; and they rework Edith Wharton's treatment of ...

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Chick lit, a subgenre of women's fiction, has been commercially popular for a decade, yet academic analyses are scant and often confined to discussions of a single text. This dissertation investigates chick lit as a genre as well as an overlooked source of sociocultural commentary. I set up a literary historical framework to examine chick lit's reworking of major narrative traditions, and, in conjunction, use chick lit as a lens through which to view gender relations in U.S. and British society in the 1990s. In each chapter I approach chick lit in a different way---as a realistic parody of Harlequin romance, as a female Bildungsroman employing novel of manners classics as frequent intertexts, and as a counter-paradigm, at times backlash, to feminism---in order to piece together different pieces of its origins and popularity. Together these chapters provide a history of conditions in publishing, consumer culture, and heterosexual courtship that have coalesced to produce this genre of veiled memoir. I draw on texts from both literary history and popular media: chick lit novels themselves, journalism, online discussion forums, author websites and interviews, industry advertisements, and lifestyle periodicals. I conclude that while chick lit was supposed to be, according to journalist Anna Weinberg, \

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