Chick Lit

"'The damned mob of scribbling women,' as Nathaniel Hawthorne labeled them, is at it again. Women writers have created a new genre called 'chick lit' that is ruffling the feathers of the literary establishment. In this pioneering book female critics take a serious look at what the genre has begotten thus far and consider its place in literary history, which has long cast a dubious eye on books written by women solely to please themselves and other women." -- Tania Modleski, author of Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women

"Ferris and Young have put together a volume of intelligent, insightful, readable essays that go beyond current positive/negative judgments of chick lit to critically dissect its importance as cultural and historical phenomenon. While the fiction itself may pass for light entertainment, these analyses extract from its pages the serious, even discomfiting, issues that make its enormous readership of (mostly) young, post-feminist women such devoted fans. Scholars, students, and chick lit fans themselves will find in this book much to ponder and discuss." -- Leslie W. Rabine, author of Reading the Romantic Heroine and The Global Circulation of African Fashion

"Chick Lit: the New Women's Fiction offers a timely analysis of a new genre. With its scholarly approach and accessible style, it offers rich possibilities as a classroom text. Teachers of contemporary literature will value its discussions of generic traits and of relationships to canonized women writers including Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and the Brontës. For cultural studies classrooms, it offers intriguing-and multicultural-meditations on commodity culture, body image, and postfeminism." -- Carol M. Dole, Professor of English, Ursinus College

"This work, rich and interesting from many points of view, has the merit of being the first to raise the curtain, without disdain or prejudice, on a new cultural product, a true media phenomenon that is still growing and shouldn't be overlooked." - Belphegor (translated from French)