The Cultural Politics Of Chick Lit

Download or read book The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit written by Heike Missler and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chick lit is the marketing label attributed to a surge of books published in the wake of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City (1997). Branded by their pink or pastel-coloured book covers, chick-lit novels have been a highly successful and ubiquitous product of women's popular culture since the late 1990s. This study traces the evolution of chick lit not only as a genre of popular fiction, but as a cultural phenomenon. It complicates the genealogy of the texts by situating them firmly in the context of age-old debates about female literary creation, and by highlighting the dynamics of the popular-fiction market. Offering a convincing dissection of the formula which lies at the heart of chick lit, as well as in-depth analyses of a number of chick-lit titles ranging from classic to more recent and edgier texts, this book yields new insights into a relatively young field of academic study. Its close readings provide astute assessments of chick lit's notoriously skewed representational politics, especially with regard to sexuality and ethnicity, which feed into current discussions about postfeminism. Moreover, the study makes a unique contribution to the scholarly debate of chick lit by including an analysis of the (online) fan communities the genre has fostered. The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit weaves a sound methodological network, drawing on reader-response criticism; feminist, gender, and queer theory; affect studies; and whiteness studies. This book is an accessible and engaging study for anyone interested in postfeminism and popular culture.

Download or read book The Blessed Girl written by Angela Makholwa and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-06-13 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'I really, really loved it' - Marian Keyes 'Absolute heaven - I am cackling out loud!' - Nina Stibbe 'The most exciting new heroine I've read in a very long time' - Katie Fforde 'Blows apart the South African society with one of fiction's most dynamic heroines' - Stylist Shortlisted for the Comedy Women in Print Prize ___________________________ Blessed [pronounced bles-id] The state of being blessed, often referring to a person, usually female, who lives a luxurious lifestyle funded by an older, often married partner Young, beautiful and ambitious, Bontle Tau has Johannesburg wrapped around her finger. Her admirers are falling over themselves to pay for her Mercedes, her penthouse, and her Instagrammable holidays. She's come a long way, and it's been far from easy. Yes, Bontle gets the blues from time to time. The shrink keeps wanting to talk about a past she's put behind her. But what she doesn't think about can't hurt her, can it? Darkly comic and razor-sharp, The Blessed Girl is an international bestseller about men, mental health, and getting rich by any means necessary...

Download or read book Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre written by Erin Hurt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-26 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars and readers alike need little help identifying the infamous Bridget Jones or Carrie Bradshaw. While it is no stretch to say that these fictional characters are the most recognizable within the chic lit genre, there are certainly many others that have helped define this body of work. While previous research has focused primarily on white American chick lit, Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre, takes a wider look at the genre, by exploring chick lit novels featuring protagonists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds set both within and outside of the US.

Download or read book Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre written by Taylor & Francis Group and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars and readers alike need little help identifying the infamous Bridget Jones or Carrie Bradshaw. While it is no stretch to say that these fictional characters are the most recognizable within the chic lit genre, there are certainly many others that have helped define this body of work. While previous research has focused primarily on white American chick lit, Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre, takes a wider look at the genre, by exploring chick lit novels featuring protagonists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds set both within and outside of the US.

Download or read book Muslim Textualities written by Jean M. Kane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-14 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Muslim women writers located in Europe and American entered the cultural mainstream. Literary and visual productions negotiated static visual emblems of Islam, most prominently "the veil." They did so not by rejecting veiling practices, but by adapting Muslim resources, concepts and visual tradition to empowerment narratives in popular media. Mainstream reception of their works has often overlooked or misread these negotiations. Muslim Textualities argues for more flexible and capacious interpretation, with particular attention to visibility as a metaphor for political agency and to knowledge of cultural contexts. This provocative volume aims to articulate Muslim female agency through clear and accessible analysis of the theory and concepts driving the interpretation of these works. Scholars interested in the working representations of Muslim women, feminist subjectivities, and the complexities of gender roles, patriarchy, and feminism will find this volume of particular interest.

Download or read book Postfeminism in Context written by Margaret Henderson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-21 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postfeminism in Context studies the representation of women in Australian popular culture over the past three decades to locate postfeminism in a specific time and place. Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor argue that ‘postfeminism’, as a critical term, has been too often deployed in ways that fail to account for historical and cultural specificity. This book analyses Australian popular culture – chick lit novels; ‘dramedy’ television shows; women’s magazines; YouTube beauty vlogs; self-help manuals; and newspapers – to reveal the tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that have always been constitutive of postfeminism, including in Australia. Examining how these popular forms intervene in dominant conversations about contemporary Australian femininities, Postfeminism in Context maps the ways in which various aspects of Australia’s history and national identity have shaped its postfeminism. While Henderson and Taylor identify some of the limited postfeminist tropes and patterns of representation evident in comparable locales, they also find that Australian popular culture has responded to feminism in a much more hopeful way. Adding some much-needed cultural specificity to the ongoing debate around this loaded term, Postfeminism in Context is essential reading for those interested in Australian popular culture, feminism, and the gendered politics of representation.

Download or read book The cultural politics of contemporary Hollywood film written by Chris Beasley and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-21 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adopting and developing a ‘cultural politics’ approach, this comprehensive study explores how Hollywood movies generate and reflect political myths about social and personal life that profoundly influence how we understand power relations. Instead of looking at genre, it employs three broad categories of film. ‘Security’ films present ideas concerning public order and disorder, citizen–state relations and the politics of fear. ‘Relationalities’ films highlight personal and intimate politics, bringing norms about identities, gender and sexuality into focus. In ‘socially critical’ films, particular issues and ideas are endowed with more overtly political significance. The book considers these categories as global political technologies implicated in hegemonic and ‘soft power’ relations whose reach is both deep and broad.