The new novel of manners: Chick lit and postfeminist sexual politics

Chick lit, a subgenre of women\u27s fiction, has been commercially popular for a decade, yet academic analyses are scant and often confined to discussions of a single text. This dissertation investigates chick lit as a genre as well as an overlooked source of sociocultural commentary. I set up a literary historical framework to examine chick lit\u27s reworking of major narrative traditions, and, in conjunction, use chick lit as a lens through which to view gender relations in U.S. and British society in the 1990s. In each chapter I approach chick lit in a different way---as a realistic parody of Harlequin romance, as a female Bildungsroman employing novel of manners classics as frequent intertexts, and as a counter-paradigm, at times backlash, to feminism---in order to piece together different pieces of its origins and popularity. Together these chapters provide a history of conditions in publishing, consumer culture, and heterosexual courtship that have coalesced to produce this genre of veiled memoir. I draw on texts from both literary history and popular media: chick lit novels themselves, journalism, online discussion forums, author websites and interviews, industry advertisements, and lifestyle periodicals. I conclude that while chick lit was supposed to be, according to journalist Anna Weinberg, the bright light of postfeminist writing, it is now a historical component of postmodernism\u27s fin de siècle. Despite a myopic social vision, these urban period pieces bring to the contemplative tradition of the novel of manners elements of adventure fiction; they extend Jane Austen\u27s comedic legacy; and they rework Edith Wharton\u27s treatment of courtship into semi-comedic form. Chick lit has monumentally changed the representation of single women in literature by portraying not figures of pity, illness, or derision, but a cast of funny, usually capable women not looking to settle. Chick lit\u27s humor belies an ambitious amalgamation of literary and popular forms, regardless of whether the ultimate product betrays solipsism and limited literary ability. Though imparting more social commentary than criticism, chick lit has established humorous fiction for women as a full-fledged literary category