(Stephenville)—At a time when women buy or influence at least 80 percent of household purchasing (according to the U.S. Census Bureau) the popular market is reaching out to the female audience more than ever. From television commercials and magazine ads, to a trend in female-oriented entertainment, “girl power” has become a movement to be taken seriously.
And now, Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, co-edited by Tarleton State University professor Mallory Young and Suzanne Ferriss, from Nova Southeastern University in Florida, is the first to scholarly examination of the pop culture phenomenon.
Released by Routledge in October 2005, and gaining attention in popular and academic critics, Chick Lit is a collection of academic essays by contributors from around the world. The writers examine the chick lit movement, begun by such best-sellers as Bridget Jones’s Diary, Sex and the City and the recent The Nanny Diaries and Shopaholic series.
The essays examine the genre’s appeal, what differentiates chick lit from
the romance genre or writing by authors such as Virginia Woolf, and chick lit’s
relationship with feminism, as well as topics such as body image, consumerism,
and subgenres such as “Mommy lit” and “chick lit, Jr.”
Chick Lit co-editor Mallory Young, a professor of English and French
at Tarleton, says women connect with the characters in chick lit for many reasons.
“A good part of the appeal lies in chick lit’s heroines. The protagonists
of books like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Sex and the City are
flawed, very human,” Young said. “Readers can imagine making the
same mistakes they do. Readers are also attracted by the books’ humor.
These are heroines who can laugh at themselves.”
Appealing to female readers’ connection to the single, ambitious female
trying to get through similar daily struggles, chick lit has taken on a financial
and popular life of its own, bringing in millions in profits and as many fans.
Despite this, it stills gets put on the back burner of scholarly study, a fact
Young says is due to bias against the genre.
“Since the first chick lit subjects hit the market, dozens and dozens of books have come out, along with lots of popular articles about it—but none on a scholarly level. We think there is a bit of prejudice against it,” Young said. “Chick lit can be considered anti-feminist in some ways, which may be part of the reason it has not been embraced by feminist professors.”
A May 26, 2006, article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that featured Young and Ferriss called the situation “a kind of academic Catch-22,” in which little scholarship exists on the subject, but scholars are reluctant to “attach [their] academic standing to a presumably lightweight—and possibly short-lived—pop-culture trend.”
Young says these concerns are legitimate, but points out that some of the professors paved their own way by considering women’s texts that were at one time brushed off by the academic literary community.
Young and Ferriss invited scholars of women’s literature and chick-lit
authors to contribute essays, posted calls for essays on scholarly websites and
extended personal invitations for submissions. The process brought in more than
75 proposals. Young said it was difficult to select the final essays, but everything
came together in the end.
“We knew we wanted to cover some very specific areas,” Young said. “The
process went very quickly—it was one of those serendipitous things where
everything just came together.” 