Montoro, Rocío (2007b) ‘The Stylistics of Cappuccino Fiction: A Socio-Cognitive Perspective’ in Lambrou, Marina and Stockwell, Peter (eds) Contemporary Stylistics. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 68-80. (original) (raw)
Related papers
2012
This dissertation examines the anxieties that the contemporary genre of women's fiction known as "chick lit" expresses about female sexuality, women and work, and the relationship between female identity and the global consumer marketplace. Furthermore, this project argues that chick lit can be productively traced to male-authored canonical texts that establish tropes and themes that chick lit novelists still grapple with at the turn of the twenty-first century. Chick lit heroines have benefitted from feminist progress, but they frequently participate in a backlash against the advances that empower them to pursue sexual pleasure outside marriage, find fulfilling careers, and challenge constructions of identity. Chapter 1 examines scholarship on constructions of gender and sexuality, affect theory, and Marxist theories. It also explores historical context through critiques of popular women writers. Chapter 2 argues that Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) establishes the first-person confessional narrative voice and a sexualized secondary female character who is punished for her non-normative sexuality. Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada (2003) demonstrate that female sexuality must still be negotiated and contained in postfeminist culture. Chapter 3 explores how work contributes to female agency in literature. Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) depicts a heroine who successfully manages her gender, race, and class performances in order to thrive in an urban space, while Kate Reddy, from Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It (2002), must pass as a non-mother in order to participate in the affective economies that prevail in the gendered workplace. Chapter 4 analyzes the role of consumer culture in female subject formation in a capitalist material culture. In Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and Blake Edwards's film version (1961), heroine Holly Golightly's proximity to the luxury
REWRITING THE ROMANCE: SHAPING THE GENRE OF “CHICK-LIT”
The aim of the thesis is to analyse how the genre of "chick lit" is formed and how it reflects the creation of the main heroine based on "Bridget Jones's Diary" by Helen Fielding. This one particular novel has been chosen because it is considered to be the precurson to the "chick-lit" stories and is known by readers worldwide. Careful analysis of the entire novel allows us to clearly distinguish the main features consisting on the "chick lit" story, but also factors influencing heroine's behaviour. Each factor shaping the main character is further analysed to highlight the importance of the influence the environment and people have on heroine. The "chick-lit" genre is a new form of romance because its plot and romantic realtionships are closely connected. The story of the main character could not exist witout romance.
Commodification and Identity in Chick Lit
Gender Studies, 2012
This paper looks at the parochial facets of femininity versus their globalized avatars as apparent in two chick lit novels, Helen Fielding's "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" 1999 and one of the novels in Sophie Kinsella's The Shopaholic series, "Shopaholic Abroad" 2001. The paradigm I am operating within is that of consumerism and commodification as the new forms of globalization. More specifically, the paper sets out to investigate the extent to which global and local facets of (feminine) identity overlap, thus engendering what I label 'glocal' femininities, and the role of the commodification thereof.
In defence of reading (and watching) trash: Feminists reading the romance
2020
In Cultural Populism, Jim McGuigan argues that in British cultural studies ‘there is populist sentiment, but hardly any “sentimentality” is discernible’. There is, however, an arena of British cultural studies that has always been concerned with ‘sentiment’ and that is the romance narrative. This article argues that the study of popular fictions has always been integral to the history of cultural studies, and that it established a site in which feminist voices would make gender politics intrinsic to the field. At a time when gender was not a central issue for either Literature or Cultural Studies, generic fictions written by and for women provided a site for research that was undeniably about female experience, and the analysis of those texts offered a strategy for asserting a feminist focus.
Women have very unique characteristics. They are far different from men. Therefore, women needs are also different from men needs including the need to read. Men tend to read adventure works. The adventure works fulfill man " s need to taste the adventure as the hero-individual or group in adventures works is able to overcome obstacles and dangers to accomplish some important and moral mission. In another hand, women prefer to read romance ones. It is because romance formula provides what women desired. Moreover, romance works are the feminine equivalent of the adventure stories. One of the romance works is chick-lits, the women best friend. As it is used romance formula, chick-lits has ability to provide women " s desire. It transforms the need, and interprets it through the narrative of chick-lits. That is why, because to find out how the interpretation of the works is a fascinating challenge, this paper tries to see the connection between chick-lits " romance formula and how it affects the readers, the women.
In recent decades, chick lit has become a ubiquitous – if not always celebrated – feature of the contemporary literary, social and cultural landscape. In Australia, Anita Heiss is one of the genre’s preeminent practitioners, and the only Aboriginal author writing chick lit for a mainstream, middleclass audience. A close reading of two of her novels (Not Meeting Mr Right and Manhattan Dreaming) reveals a deep political engagement running through her fiction. On the one hand, this political engagement is expressed by Heiss’ commitment to foregrounding the lives and experiences of young, urban, Aboriginal women. On the other hand, the narrative is peppered with references to, and discussion of, urgent political issues: from banning the burqa in France to protesting the Northern Territory intervention in Melbourne. By recasting the chick lit genre in an explicitly political light, Heiss joins a growing number of authors who challenge the genre’s fixation with exclusively white subjectivities and epistemologies. In this paper, I argue that changing one aspect of the chick lit genre, such as the race of the heroine, is enough to destabilise the genre as a whole. This destabilisation creates a political hierarchy where racial politics gain precedence over other issues such as feminism and sexual diversity. Humour, one of the requirements of the chick lit genre, also underscores this destabilisation: while some subjects are played for laughs, others are designated as strictly off-limits.
Book of Abstracts: World Literature and the Minor: Figuration, Circulation, Translation, 5 –7 May 2021 (KU Leuven), 2021
Chick lit is – by the nature of its popularity and economic pull – world literature, even if it has not found much acceptance within academic circles as such. This friction between major circulation and minor reputation creates opportunities for pluralization driven by strategies – such as, including complex topics which connect the local/regional with the global, consider gender/identity in terms of transformation, and shift the grounds for discussions about transculturation and decolonisation – that deny simplistic readings and force fresh approaches. Focusing thus on how the genre fits into the chorus of the so-called “new world literatures” (Sturm-Trigonakis), this panel brings together five very different elucidations of chick lit to expose the sheer potential for a veritable chick-lit discourse on a par with other critically acclaimed genres. Narratives of migration linking the USA, Canada, the UK, and the Philippines, British young adult literature and chick lit, Swedish auto-fiction, and South African postcolonial women´s literature are discussed in contrast and comparison with each other, revealing the cultural and linguistic adaptability of a young, white, Western, heterosexual, cosmopolitan protagonist-driven literary form. Chick lit thus plays with and challenges its minor reputation and major circulation by way of showing its capacity to transform itself, intersect with other genres, and evolve the literary landscape it is being translated into.