Chick Lit and Postfeminism by Stephanie Harzewski (review)

Stephanie Harzewski's study Chick Lit and Postfeminism is the latest addition to the scholarly body of work treating popular women's fiction and, more specifically, chick lit, the genre of comic narratives spawned in the 1990s by Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and the American television version of Sex and the City (1998-2004). Harzewski is no newcomer to the field: she was a contributor—one of the most often cited—to the first scholarly work devoted to the genre, Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction.¹ Given her role as a member of the target audience of chick lit, which she openly acknowledges, Harzewski is the ideal scholar to provide the next major contribution to the study of this popular genre (pp. 194-95).

The title of Harzewski's book is, in my view, somewhat misleading; while the author does consider the issue of postfeminism at several points throughout the text, her major contribution is to situate chick lit historically and generically within the larger body of popular women's fiction. In accomplishing that goal she often focuses more on other forms of popular fiction than on chick lit itself. In fact, I find that the book works better when viewed as a collection of individual essays, often only loosely connected by the topic of chick lit. Even within these individual sections, though, the organization is sometimes puzzling. This is not, however, a serious criticism given that each section provides significant insights on issues ranging from popular-culture productions surrounding Jane Austen to working-girl fiction of the 1920s and 1930s.

Following a fairly extensive introduction, Harzewski moves her focus to the Harlequin romance in order to contrast chick-lit conventions with those of its most obvious predecessor. Harzewski does a fine job of presenting the differing primary conventions of the two genres; more importantly, however, she connects these popular forms as frequent targets of what she terms the "historical denigration" of women's popular fiction (p. 40). As Harzewski argues, "The critical reception of chick lit can be seen as another cycle of gendered antinovel discourse directed at the composer of romance and amatory fiction, a discourse that has punctuated the novel's three-hundred-year history" (pp. 40-41).

In the following section focused on Bridget Jones's Diary and Jane Austen, the author undertakes an interesting intertextual approach. Looking first at Austen's influence on Helen Fielding's hugely popular novel—and through that novel on the entire body of chick lit—she then inverts the strategy and notes how chick lit has influenced the popular reception of Austen. Her claim that contemporary "Austenmania" has been fueled by the popularity of chick lit is, I think, a convincing one. Harzewski puts forward similar ideas regarding the major literary influences on chick lit in the chapter connecting Sex and the City—in its book (1997), television (1998-2004), and film (2008 and 2010) manifestations—with the New York novel, particularly the works of Edith Wharton. Connections between Wharton and chick lit are undeniable—most significantly, as Harzewski points out, with respect to the central issue of consumerism. The chapter's lengthy discussion of Candace Bushnell, the author of the original Sex and the City novel, did not appear to me particularly useful to an understanding of chick lit, although it does convincingly establish the television adaptation as a far more important contributor than Bushnell herself.

The chapter titled "The Legacy of Working-Girl Fiction," while arguably the section least clearly connected to chick lit, presents a valuable discussion that complements Imelda Whelehan's foundational work, The Feminist Bestseller: From "Sex and the Single Girl" to "Sex and the City" (2005). Harzewski brings to light a number of popular novels appearing from the 1920s to the 1970s. Although few of the works discussed can be convincingly established as influences on chick lit, the chapter nonetheless provides an important contribution to the study of rarely noticed women-centered...