CHICK LIT AS THE NEW WOMAN’S FICTION: INSCRIPTIONS IN MARIAN KEYES’S NOVEL

Chick lit, just as other formulaic genres, is often dismissed in literary criticism, despite its appeal to contemporary female reader-ship1. The fact that chick lit has definitely won the status of a feminist bestseller as literature “for the ‘new woman, ’ the contemporary reader of our postfeminist culture, and a ‘new woman’s fiction, ’ a form of popular literature (largely) written by women for a female audience, ” to quote Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, invites us to consider the genre’s status in the literary tradition. It hence has to be analysed in light of the attributes that relegate the emerging genre to the status of lit rather than literature. This article attempts to present the main characteristics of chick lit fiction as well as to reflect on its links with other formulaic genres paying special attention to the narrative’s affinities with the popular romance. This discussion lays the foundation for the analysis of Marian Keyes’s Watermelon focusing on the novel’s engagement with other fiction genres to reveal changing perceptions of gender roles, auto-nomy, and subjectivity