Download or read book Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit written by Caroline J. Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-12-12 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit focuses on the literary phenomenon popularly known as chick lit, and the way in which this genre interfaces with magazines, self-help books, romantic comedies, and domestic-advice publications. This recent trend in women’s popular fiction, which began in 1996 with the publication of British author Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Diary, uses first person narration to chronicle the romantic tribulations of its young, single, white, heterosexual, urban heroines. Critics of the genre have failed to fully appreciate chick lit’s complicated representations of women as both readers and consumers. In this study, Smith argues that chick lit questions the "consume and achieve promise" offered by advice manuals marketed toward women, subverting the consumer industry to which it is so closely linked and challenging cultural expectations of women as consumers, readers, and writers, and of popular fiction itself.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction 2 Volumes written by Patrick O'Donnell and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 1607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.
Download or read book Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema written by J. Gwynne and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By analyzing the negotiation of femininities and masculinities within contemporary Hollywood cinema, Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema presents diverse interrogations of popular cinema and illustrates the need for a renewed scholarly focus on contemporary film production.
Download or read book The Postcolonial Cultural Industry written by S. Ponzanesi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Postcolonial Cultural Industry makes a timely intervention into the field of postcolonial studies by unpacking its relation to the cultural industry. It unearths the role of literary prizes, the adaptation industry and the marketing of ethnic bestsellers as new globalization strategies that connect postcolonial artworks to the market place.
Download or read book Asian American Literature in Transition 1996 2020 Volume 4 written by Betsy Huang and published by Asian American Literature in T. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the concerns - political, literary, and identity-based - of contemporary Asian American literatures in neoliberal times.
Download or read book Culture Health and Religion at the Millennium written by M. Demker and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-19 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book presents interpretations of culture, health, politics, and religion in Sweden today, Sweden transforms from the well-functioning but existentially bland economic wonder to a more fragmented and gloomy society. Contributors include scholars from film studies, literary studies, political science, religious studies and theology
Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction written by Jayashree Kamblé and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular romance fiction constitutes the largest segment of the global book market. Bringing together an international group of scholars, The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction offers a ground-breaking exploration of this global genre and its remarkable readership. In recognition of the diversity of the form, the Companion provides a history of the genre, an overview of disciplinary approaches to studying romance fiction, and critical analyses of important subgenres, themes, and topics. It also highlights new and understudied avenues of inquiry for future research in this vibrant and still-emerging field. The first systematic, comprehensive resource on romance fiction, this Companion will be invaluable to students and scholars, and accessible to romance readers.
Download or read book Chick Lit and Postfeminism written by Stephanie Harzewski and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2011-02-09 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally a euphemism for Princeton University’s Female Literary Tradition course in the 1980s, "chick lit" mutated from a movement in American women’s avant-garde fiction in the 1990s to become, by the turn of the century, a humorous subset of women’s literature, journalism, and advice manuals. Stephanie Harzewski examines such best sellers as Bridget Jones’s Diary The Devil Wears Prada, and Sex and the City as urban appropriations of and departures from the narrative traditions of the novel of manners, the popular romance, and the bildungsroman. Further, Harzewski uses chick lit as a lens through which to view gender relations in U.S. and British society in the 1990s. Chick Lit and Postfeminism is the first sustained historicization of this major pop-cultural phenomenon, and Harzewski successfully demonstrates how chick lit and the critical study of it yield social observations on upheavals in Anglo-American marriage and education patterns, heterosexual rituals, feminism, and postmodern values.
Download or read book Chick Lit written by Rocío Montoro and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent times, Chick Lit has risen to a certain level of prominence. This is the first book length study that looks into the distinctive features of this much-discussed genre. Chick Lit is examined in relation to its linguistic peculiarities and their role as far as narrative, sociological and feminist issues are concerned, amongst others. Montoro's stylistics includes a cognitive slant that highlights futher readerly aspects of the texts. The approach illuminates how the genre works, and how it is set apart from others. In this respect, the stylistics of chick lit is understood in its contect of production and reception. Montoro evaluates reading processes and investigates readers' responsive attitude to the genre. This interdisciplinary work explores the boundaries of the stylistics of chick lit and works reflectively, looking at how exploring this genre can help the twofold aim of testing existing models of linguistic and cognitive analysis. It will be essential reading for those interested in cutting-edge stylistics.
Download or read book Geographies of Love written by Christian Lenz and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: »Geographies of Love« is the first study to explore the cultural lifeworlds of British, Australian and Indian chick- and ladlit characters. Offering unique case studies including »Bridget Jones's Diary«, »About a Boy« and »Almost Single«, the book explores how women and men search for love and how they commit themselves to romances in specific spaces and places: the home and the office as well as shops, clubs and bars. This cross-disciplinary study provides scholars, students and keen readers with multiple points of access and easily-relatable situations. It applies the complex phenomenon of cultural geographies within the field of literary studies and sheds new light on a most passionate feeling.
Download or read book Romantik 2023 written by Gísli Magnússon and published by V&R unipress. This book was released on 2024-11-18 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Romantik. Journal for the Study of Romanticisms” is a multidisciplinary journal dedicated to the study of romantic-era cultural productions and concepts. The journal promotes innovative research across disciplinary borders. It aims to advance new historical discoveries, forward-looking theoretical insights and cutting-edge methodological approaches. The articles range over the full variety of cultural practices, including the written word, visual arts, history, philosophy, religion, and theatre during the romantic period (c. 1780–1840). But contributions to the discussion of pre- or post-romantic representations are also welcome. Since the romantic era was characterized by an emphasis on the vernacular, the title of the journal has been chosen to reflect the Germanic root of the word. But the journal is interested in all European romanticisms – and not least the connections and disconnections between them – hence, the use of the plural in the subtitle. Romantik is a peer-reviewed journal supported by the Nordic Board for Periodicals in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOP-HS).
Download or read book Buyers Beware written by Patricia Joan Saunders and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-13 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buyers Beware offers a new perspective for critical inquiries about the practices of consumption in (and of) Caribbean popular culture. The book revisits commonly accepted representations of the Caribbean from “less respectable” segments of popular culture such as dancehall culture and 'sistah lit' that proudly jettison any aspirations toward middle-class respectability. Treating these pop cultural texts and phenomena with the same critical attention as dominant mass cultural representations of the region allows Patricia Joan Saunders to read them against the grain and consider whether and how their “pulp” preoccupation with contemporary fashion, music, sex, fast food, and television, is instructive for how race, class, gender, sexuality and national politics are constructed, performed, interpreted, disseminated and consumed from within the Caribbean.
Download or read book Contemporary World Narrative Fiction and the Spaces of Neoliberalism written by Michael K. Walonen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a transnational study of how contemporary fiction writers from the United States and Canada to Nigeria to India to Dubai have conceptualized the emergent social spaces of the diverse corners of the neoliberal world system. Over the span of the past three to four decades, free market economic policies have been sold to or pushed upon every society on the globe in some way, shape, or form. The upshot of this has been a world system structured in terms of a vast shift of power and resources from government to private enterprise, dwindling civic life replaced by rising consumerism, an emerging oligarchic rentier class, large segments of population faced with meager material conditions of existence and few prospects of socio-economic mobility, and a looming sense of a near future dominated by further economic collapses and mounting social strife. This book analyses a wide cultural array of some of the most poignant narrative engagements with neoliberalism in its various localized manifestations throughout the world.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Fiction 3 Volume Set written by Brian W. Shaffer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 1581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile
Download or read book Gossip Women Film and Chick Flicks written by Sarah-Mai Dang and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the relationship between gossip, women, and film with regards to the genre of chick flicks. Presenting two case studies on the films Easy A (Will Gluck 2010) and Emma (Douglas McGrath 1996), Dang demonstrates that hearsay plays a defining role in the staging of these films and thus in the film experience. While the lack of women’s voices in the general public sphere remains an issue, the female voice is very present in the contemporary woman’s film. In its analysis of gossip, this book focuses on a form of communication that has traditionally been assigned to women and is consequently disregarded. Dang provides a theoretical framework for the understanding of speech acts in the popular, yet undertheorized, genre of chick flicks.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature written by Cynthia Conchita Sugars and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 993 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature provides a broad-ranging introduction to some of the key critical fields, genres, and periods in Canadian literary studies. The essays in this volume, written by prominent theorists in the field, reflect the plurality of critical perspectives, regional and historical specializations, and theoretical positions that constitute the field of Canadian literary criticism across a range of genres and historical periods. The volume provides a dynamic introduction to current areas of critical interest, including (1) attention to the links between the literary and the public sphere, encompassing such topics as neoliberalism, trauma and memory, citizenship, material culture, literary prizes, disability studies, literature and history, digital cultures, globalization studies, and environmentalism or ecocriticism; (2) interest in Indigenous literatures and settler-Indigenous relations; (3) attention to multiple diasporic and postcolonial contexts within Canada; (4) interest in the institutionalization of Canadian literature as a discipline; (5) a turn towards book history and literary history, with a renewed interest in early Canadian literature; (6) a growing interest in articulating the affective character of the "literary" - including an interest in affect theory, mourning, melancholy, haunting, memory, and autobiography. The book represents a diverse array of interests -- from the revival of early Canadian writing, to the continued interest in Indigenous, regional, and diasporic traditions, to more recent discussions of globalization, market forces, and neoliberalism. It includes a distinct section dedicated to Indigenous literatures and traditions, as well as a section that reflects on the discipline of Canadian literature as a whole.
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.