Chick lit
[3] Novels identified as chick lit typically address romantic relationships, female friendships, and workplace struggles in humorous and lighthearted ways.
[7] The format developed through the early 1990s on both sides of the Atlantic with books such as Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale (1992, US) and Catherine Alliott's The Old Girl Network (1994, UK).
Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996, UK), wildly popular globally, is the "Ur-text" of chick lit, while Candace Bushnell's (US) 1997 novel Sex and the City, adapted to a well-known television program, has huge ongoing cultural influence.
[17] In the early years, there was some variation on the exact term used: in 2000, the Sydney Morning Herald reported the birth of a "publishing phenomenon" that can be called "chick fiction.
"[23] In 2001, writer Doris Lessing deemed the genre "instantly forgettable" while Beryl Bainbridge called chick lit "a froth sort of thing".
[24] Author Jenny Colgan immediately fired back at Lessing and Bainbridge, explaining why, for a new generation of women, chick lit was an important development: We really are the first generation who have grown up with education as a right; with financial independence; with living on our own and having far too many choices about getting married (while watching our baby boomer parents fall apart), having children (while watching our elder sisters run themselves ragged trying to do everything), and hauling ourselves up through the glass ceiling.
Growing up in the 1980s all we had to read if we wanted commercial fiction, were thick, shiny, brick novels covered in gold foil, in which women with long blonde hair built up business empires from harsh beginnings using only their extraordinary beauty and occasionally some goldfish... With BJD, for the first time, here we were.
"[28] In response, self-identifying chick-lit author Lauren Baratz-Logsted published her own anthology of stories This Is Chick Lit[29] whose project was "born out of anger" and aimed to prove that chick lit was not all "Manolos and cosmos, and cookie-cutter books about women juggling relationships and careers in the new millennium," but rather that the genre deals with "friendship and laughter, love and death - i.e. the stuff of life.
However, in general through the late 2000s and 2010s writers of women's popular fiction increasingly distanced themselves from the term chick lit, while arguing that blanket critical dismissals of their work were rooted in sexism.
In 2000, Sydney Morning Herald described the "publishing phenomenon" of what it called "chicfic," books with "Covers [that] are candy-bright, heavy in pink and fluorescence.
...Such books are positioned in a marketplace as hybrids of the magazine article, fictional or fictionalised, television...and comfort food digestible over a single night at home.
In 2003, Publishers Weekly reported on numerous new chick lit imprints, such as, "Kensington's Strapless, which launched in April 2003 and has one book a month scheduled through the end of 2004.
Kensington editorial director John Scognamiglio explained that the imprint was created in response to requests from salespeople for a chick lit brand."
[36] The academic Sandra Folie argues that "Fans and their websites or blogs, online presences of newspapers, magazines, or publishing houses, and also the free encyclopedia Wikipedia" played a key part in defining and shaping the concept of a chick lit genre.
In a book published in 2011, and in an article in Le Monde Diplomatique, academic Madawi Al-Rasheed discussed the emergence of Saudi "chick lit" over the preceding decade.
If the chick lit explosion has "led to great new female writers emerging from Eastern Europe and India, then it's worth any number of feeble bandwagon jumpers.
"[10] Sunaina Kumar wrote in the Indian Express, "Ten years after the publication of Bridget Jones's Diary, the genre of fiction most recognisable for its pink cover art of stilettos, martini glasses and lipsticks, is now being colourfully infused with bindis, saris, and bangles."
