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Chick lit

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"Chick lit" is a term used to denote genre fiction written for and marketed to young women, especially single, working women in their twenties and thirties. The genre's creation was spurred on, if not exactly created, by Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole diaries which inspired Adele Lang's Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber: The Katya Livingston Chronicles in the mid-1990s. Another strong early influence can be seen in the books by M. C. Beaton about Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth. The style can also be seen to be somewhat influenced by female teen angst movies like Sixteen Candles and Clueless. Later with the appearance of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and similar works; the genre continued to sell well in the 2000s, with chick lit titles topping bestseller lists and the creation of imprints devoted entirely to chick lit.

1 The genre
2 Origins of the term
3 Quotations about chick lit
4 Major scandals
5 Movie adaptations
6 External links

The genre

Chick lit features hip, stylish female protagonists, usually in their twenties and thirties, in urban settings (usually London or Manhattan), and follows their love lives and struggles for professional success (often in the publishing, advertising, public relations or fashion industry). The books usually feature an airy, irreverent tone and frank sexual themes. The genre spawned Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City and its accompanying television series. Popular Chick lit novelists include Ireland's Marian Keyes, Cecelia Ahern, and Sophie Kinsella author of the Shopaholic series. Variations have developed to appeal to specific audiences, such as "Chica Lit," aimed at English-dominant, middle-class American Latinas, the top-seller being novelist and film writer/producer Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez; Christian Chick Lit, Matron Lit (aka Hen Lit) for middle-aged women, Young Adult Chick Lit (also Teen Lit), and the novels of Emmy-winning author Lori Bryant-Woolridge, known for her chick lit novels (Read Between the Lies, Hitts and Mrs., Mourning Glo) written specifically with women of color in mind.

Origins of the term

"Chick" is an American slang term for young woman and "Lit" is short for "literature". The term might also be a pun on Chiclets, a brand of chewing gum. The term was introduced by Cris Mazza and Jeffrey DeShell as an ironic title for their edited anthology Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction," published in 1995. The genre was defined as a type of post-feminist or second-wave feminism that went beyond female-as-victim to include fiction that covered the breadth of female experiences, including love, courtship and gender. The collection emphasized experimental work, including violent,perverse and sexual themes. James Wolcott's 1996 article in The New Yorker "Hear Me Purr" co-opted the term "chick lit" to proscribe what he called the trend of "girlishness" evident in the writing of female newspaper columnists at that time. Works such as Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City are examples of such work that helped establish contemporary connotations of the term. The success of Bridget Jones and Sex and the City in book form established chick lit as an important trend in publishing. The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank is regarded as one of the first chick lit works to originate as a novel (actually a collection of stories), though the term "chick lit" was in common use at the time of its publication (1999). Publishers continue to push the sub-genre because of its viability as a sales tactic. Various other terms have been coined as variant in attempts to attach themselves to the perecieved marketability of the work. Some critics have noted a male equivalent in authors like Ben Elton, Mike Gayle, Paul Howard and Nick Hornby, referred to as "lad lit" and "dick lit"

Quotations about chick lit

"To suggest that another woman's ostensibly literary novel is chick lit feels catty, not unlike calling another woman a slut -- doesn't the term basically bring down all of us?" -- Curtis Sittenfeld in the New York Times [1] "Chick lit claims to be representative of women’s lives, their hopes, fears, dreams and values. But it’s actually about white, upper-middle-class American and Western European women. Chick-lit defenders like to point out that there is black and Latina chick lit, chick lit for older women, but this is all tokenism—a chance for women of every color and age to be portrayed as annoying, shallow twits. Just like George W. claims to be a regular Joe, chick lit claims to be the story of the Everywoman, when really, it’s the story of Some Women of a Certain Class. Which is pretty ironic, given that chick-lit authors cry elitism more often than their characters accidentally trip on their own designer shoes and fall into tall, handsome strangers." -- Anonymous Chick lit editor in Boston's Weekly Dig [2]

Major scandals

In April 2006, 19-year-old Harvard College sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan faced a major scandal when it was discovered that her chick lit novel "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life", published by Little, Brown and Co. had lifted major portions from several other chick lit books, most notably Megan McCafferty’s "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings". Plagiarized passages were also found of Salman Rushdie's and Meg Cabot's work. Significantly, Kaavya had received a $500,000 advance for her first book, with plans for another. Her publishers were so embarrassed that on May 4 2006, they recalled all unsold copies of the book with plans to destroy them, and called off the second book deal. The movie studio also stopped pre-production and dropped her movie project based on the book.