Review: Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre, edited by Erin Hurt

Abstract

More than two decades ago, chick lit was proclaimed the newest subgenre of romance, considered by some writers and critics so defiant of genre conventions that they would not count it as romance at all. Since then, both the initial “unquestioning adoration of fans” and “the unmitigated disdain of critics” (Ferriss and Young, 1) have receded. Starting in 1996 with Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City, chick lit broke with some well-established romance conventions such as the one man-one woman ratio or the unrestricted focus on the quest for great love in preference to portraying professional women who dated several men. The combination of romance tropes with more emancipated, economically independent heroines resonated with readers in a new era and triggered, in the words of New York Times journalist Rachel Donadio (2006), a global “Chick-Lit Pandemic” with similar novels springing up in various places and languages