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 222 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 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 You ve Come A Long Way Baby written by Lilly J. Goren and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2009-05-22 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The landmark 2008 presidential and vice presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin brought the role of women in American leadership into sharper focus than ever before. These women and others such as Nancy Pelosi and Katie Couric who are successful in traditionally male-dominated fields, demonstrate how women's roles have changed in the last thirty years. In the past, the nightly news was anchored by male journalists, presidential cabinets were composed solely of male advisors, and a female presidential candidate was an idea for the distant future, but the efforts of dedicated reformers have changed the social landscape. The empowerment of women is not limited to the political sphere, but is also echoed by the portrayal of women in film, television, magazines, and literature. You've Come a Long Way, Baby: Women, Politics, and Popular Culture investigates the role of popular culture in women's lives. Framed by discussions of contemporary feminism, the volume examines gender in relation to sexuality, the workplace, consumerism, fashion, politics, and the beauty industry. In analyzing societal depictions of women, editor Lilly J. Goren and an impressive list of contributors illustrate how media reflects and shapes the feminine sense of power, identity, and the daily challenges of the twenty-first century. Along with a discussion of women in politics, various contributors examine a range of gender-related issues from modern motherhood and its implications for female independence to the roles of women and feminism in pop music. In addition, Natalie Fuehrer Taylor outlines the evolution of women's magazines from Ladies' Home Journal to Cosmopolitan. The impact of television and literature on body image issues is also explored by Linda Beail, who draws on trendy chick lit phenomena such as Gossip Girl and Sex and the City, and Emily Askew, who analyzes the effects of image transformation in programs such as The Swan and Extreme Makeover. As comprehensive as it is accessible, You've Come a Long Way, Baby is a practical guide to understanding modern gender roles. In tracing the different ways in which femininity is constructed and viewed, the book demonstrates how women have reclaimed traditionally domestic activities that include knitting, gardening, and cooking, as well as feminine symbols such as Barbie dolls, high heels, and lipstick. Though the demand for and pursuit of gender equality opened many doors, the contributors reveal that fictional women's roles are often at odds with the daily experiences of most women. By employing an open approach rather than adhering to a single, narrow theory, You've Come a Long Way, Baby appeals not only to scholars and students of gender studies but to anyone interested in confronting the struggles and celebrating the achievements of women in modern society.
Download or read book Chick Lit written by Suzanne Ferriss and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling Bridget Jones's Diary that started the trend to the television sensation Sex and the Citythat captured it on screen, "chick lit" has become a major pop culture phenomenon. Banking on female audiences' identification with single, urban characters who struggle with the same life challenges, publishers have earned millions and even created separate imprints dedicated to the genre. Not surprisingly, some highbrow critics have dismissed chick lit as trashy fiction, but fans have argued that it is as empowering as it is entertaining. This is the first volume of its kind to examine the chick lit phenomenon from a variety of angles, accounting for both its popularity and the intense reactions-positive and negative-it has provoked. The contributors explore the characteristics that cause readers to attach the moniker "chick" to a particular book and what, if anything, distinguishes the category of chick lit from the works of Jane Austen on one end and Harlequin romance novels on the other. They critique the genre from a range of critical perspectives, considering its conflicted relationship with feminism and postfeminism, heterosexual romance, body image, and consumerism. The fourteen original essays gathered here also explore such trends and subgenres as "Sistah Lit," "Mommy Lit," and "Chick Lit Jr.," as well as regional variations. As the first book to consider the genre seriously, Chick Lit offers real insight into a new generation of women's fiction.
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 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author offers a scholarly dissection of "chick lit" from a post-feminist perspective. She analyzes the novel Bridget Jones' Diary and the HBO series Sex and the City while making parallels back to writings of Jane Austen and the Victorian novel in general. She looks at what these works say about women in society and whether they are just an escape or a serious reflection of women's concerns.
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 319 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.
Download or read book Literary Translation Reception and Transfer written by Norbert Bachleitner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three concepts mentioned in the title of this volume imply the contact between two or more literary phenomena; they are based on similarities that are related to a form of ‘travelling’ and imitation or adaptation of entire texts, genres, forms or contents. Transfer comprises all sorts of ‘travelling’, with translation as a major instrument of transferring literature across linguistic and cultural barriers. Transfer aims at the process of communication, starting with the source product and its cultural context and then highlighting the mediation by certain agents and institutions to end up with inclusion in the target culture. Reception lays its focus on the receiving culture, especially on critcism, reading, and interpretation. Translation, therefore, forms a major factor in reception with the general aim of reception studies being to reveal the wide spectrum of interpretations each text offers. Moreover, translations are the prime instrument in the distribution of literature across linguistic and cultural borders; thus, they pave the way for gaining prestige in the world of literature. The thirty-eight papers included in this volume and dedicated to research in this area were previously read at the ICLA conference 2016 in Vienna. They are ample proof that the field remains at the center of interest in Comparative Literature.
Download or read book Interrogating Postfeminism written by Yvonne Tasker and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-11-02 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVFeminist essays examining postfeminism in American and British popular culture./div
Download or read book Rethinking Gender in Popular Culture in the 21st Century written by Astrid M. Fellner and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-06 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores popular culture representations of gender, offering a rich and accessible discussion of masculinities and femininities in 21st-century popular media. It brings together contributors from various European countries to investigate the workings of gender in contemporary pop culture products in a brave, original, and rigorous way. This volume is both an academic proposal and an exercise of commitment to a serious analysis of some of the media that influence us most in our everyday lives. Representation matters, and the position we take as viewers or consumers during reception matters even more.
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 Female Complaint written by Lauren Berlant and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-17 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant’s groundbreaking “national sentimentality” project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural “intimate public” in the United States, a “women’s culture” distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, “women’s” books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman’s life is not just her own, but an experience understood by other women, no matter how dissimilar they are. The commodified genres of intimacy, such as “chick lit,” circulate among strangers, enabling insider self-help talk to flourish in an intimate public. Sentimentality and complaint are central to this commercial convention of critique; their relation to the political realm is ambivalent, as politics seems both to threaten sentimental values and to provide certain opportunities for their extension. Pairing literary criticism and historical analysis, Berlant explores the territory of this intimate public sphere through close readings of U.S. women’s literary works and their stage and film adaptations. Her interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its literary descendants reaches from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, touching on Shirley Temple, James Baldwin, and The Bridges of Madison County along the way. Berlant illuminates different permutations of the women’s intimate public through her readings of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat; Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life; Olive Higgins Prouty’s feminist melodrama Now, Voyager; Dorothy Parker’s poetry, prose, and Academy Award–winning screenplay for A Star Is Born; the Fay Weldon novel and Roseanne Barr film The Life and Loves of a She-Devil; and the queer, avant-garde film Showboat 1988–The Remake. The Female Complaint is a major contribution from a leading Americanist.
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 New Femininities written by R. Gill and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays looks at the way in which experiences and representations of femininity are changing, and explores the possibilities for producing 'new' femininities in the twenty-first century. The volume includes a Preface by leading feminist scholar Angela McRobbie.
Download or read book Pop feminist Narratives written by Emily Spiers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the recent phenomenon of 'pop-feminism' and pop-feminist writing across North America, Britain, and Germany and examines what feminist politics look like in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Too Fat Too Slutty Too Loud written by Anne Helen Petersen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You know the type: the woman who won't shut up, who's too brazen, too opinionated - too much. She's the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, popular BuzzFeed columnist Anne Helen Petersen examines this phenomenon, using the lens of 'unruliness' to discuss the ascension of pop culture powerhouses like Amy Schumer, Nicki Minaj, and Caitlyn Jenner, and why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures.
Download or read book Laboring Bodies and the Quantified Self written by Ulfried Reichardt and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2020-10-31 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The body has become central to practices of self-tracking. By focusing on the relations between quantification, the body, and labor, this volume sheds light on the ways in which discourses on data collection and versions of the ›corporate self‹ are instrumental in redefining concepts of labor, including notions of immaterial and free labor in an increasingly virtual work environment. The contributions explore the functions of quantification in conceptualizing the body as a laboring body and examine how quantification contributes to disciplining the body. By doing so, they also inquire how practices of self-tracking, self-monitoring, and self-optimization have evolved historically.
