Teaching Resources—Chick Lit

The chick-lit genre is a form of commercially published women's fiction that emerged in the mid-1990s, typified by such novels as Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City (1997). While at first glance the genre may appear to counter a feminist praxis, especially with the label of "chick," the analysis of these novels enables readers to engage in a discussion of feminism and to analyze the representation of women in popular culture. The genre has evolved to include various subgenres, such as teen chick lit and Latina chica lit, which offers some depth and diversity to a body of literature that tends to be stigmatized as being completely superficial. In particular, these books continue to be popular among girls and are increasingly being analyzed and assessed by scholars and librarians. Although often perceived as "light" reading for leisure, chick lit novels included within a classroom or book club can complement and complicate other lessons or reading lists focusing more broadly on women's literature.

Contextualizing Chick Lit

It is useful to analyze the production (publishers/authors) and consumption (readers) of chick lit in addition to doing close textual analysis. Several texts offer excellent background information and critical scholarship around the topic of chick lit. When teaching chick lit, you may wish to include some of these sources in your syllabi so that students can read this contextual information alongside the novels. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young's edited anthology Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction (2006) is a must-read, as it presents a breadth of information on the genre, including a thorough history of its development. Divided into three parts, this anthology compares the genre with early women's writings, provides analyses on several chick lit subgenres, and offers feminist critiques of the genre. Caroline Smith's Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit (2007) focuses specifically on the commercial aspects of the genre, both textually and in relation to its female readership and other forms of commercial culture, such as women's magazines. Other useful sources of information are found in two "how-to" writing manuals on the genre. See Sarah Mlynowski and Farrin Jacobs's See Jane Write: A Girl's Guide to Writing Chick Lit (2006) and Cathy Yardley's Will Write for Shoes: How to Write a Chick Lit Novel (2006). Aimed at aspiring chick-lit novelists, these manuals provide a close look at formal elements such as narrative structure, as well as trends within the genre, common plot devices, and themes.

Chick lit definitely has its strong proponents and also its critics. Just as some praise its format and conversational narratives, others perceive the genre as working against the tenets of feminism and at the expense of "serious" women's literary fiction. In 2006, the anthology This Is Not Chick Lit was published to showcase American women writers who wanted to disassociate themselves from the chick lit label. In response to this, several chick lit authors contributed to This Is Chick-Lit (2006), so as to reclaim and defend the genre but also validate the work that they do, even if it is for pure entertainment. Listen to NPR's Talk of the Nation segment entitled "Fiction Anthology Refuses 'Chick Lit' Label," which includes interviews with some of the authors featured in This Is Not Chick Lit and offers insight into the criticism surrounding the chick lit genre (available online).

It is also helpful to read chick lit alongside scholarship on romance novels. While romance novels are different from chick lit novels, often the boundaries of the two genres are blurred, with some authors writing both types of novels and with Harlequin, a popular romance publisher, creating their own chick lit imprint, "Red Dress Ink." The subject of romance is present in both; chick lit, however, usually presents the romance topic as subordinate to the heroine's own personal development. See Janice A. Radway's canonical text Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, 2nd edition (1991) for an excellent analysis of the publishing industry, romance novels, and women...