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From the bestselling Bridget Jones's Diary that started the trend to the television sensation Sex and the Citythat captured it on screen, "chick lit" has become a major pop culture phenomenon. Banking on female audiences' identification with single, urban characters who struggle with the same life challenges, publishers have earned millions and even created separate imprints dedicated to the genre. Not surprisingly, some highbrow critics have dismissed chick lit as trashy fiction, but fans have argued that it is as empowering as it is entertaining. This is the first volume of its kind to examine the chick lit phenomenon from a variety of angles, accounting for both its popularity and the int...
Focused on the relation between processes of globalization and literary genres, this volume intervenes in the prevalent notions of globalization, literary history, genre, and the novel. Using both close reading and world history, both literary criticism and political theory, the book is a timely intervention in the debates about world, postcolonial, and transnational literature as they have been intensified by critical globalization studies, world-systems analysis, Bourdieuan sociology, and cosmopolitanism studies. It contends that globalization, far from starting in recent decades, has a long and complex history, not unlike the history of literature itself, meaning that when we speak of glo...
Disruptive Women of Literature: Rooting for the Antiheroine critically examines the representation of the literary antiheroine in contemporary Gothic and crime-thriller novels and traces her emergence from the deviant women of Greek mythology and Shakespeare to the twenty-first century. It explores how the antiheroine shifts dependent on genre, time period, and format, demonstrating that she is capable of both challenging and reaffirming problematic ideologies surrounding women, power, violence, sexuality, and motherhood. Eleanore Gardner argues that the antiheroine is almost always defined by her experience of a patriarchal trauma and must therefore navigate her identity differently and more complexly than her antihero counterpart. The author examines a broad range of texts to understand the antiheroine’s fluidity, her liminal and abject existence, and what these suggest about cultural anxieties surrounding transgressive women.
Has the third wave of feminism in the United States spawned a literary movement? Is there a third wave equivalent of the consciousness-rasing novel? A lot has been written about the relationship of the third wave of feminism in the United States to the second wave, yet no one has examined works by young female writers as belonging to the third wave of feminism. This book fills the gap. Using tools of literary criticism to analyze the literary output of third wave feminism in the United States, Ungrateful Daughters looks at the main anthologies of third wave writings, paying attention to their structure, production process and narrative forms used in the individual pieces. It also attempts to...
Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema examines the way that contemporary film reflects today’s changing gender roles. The book offers a comprehensive overview of the central issues in feminist film criticism with analyses of over twenty popular contemporary films across a range of genres, such as chick flicks, teen pics, hommecoms, horror, action adventure, indie flicks, and women lawyer films. Contributors explore issues of femininity as well as masculinity, reflecting on the interface of popular cinema with gendered realities and feminist ideas. Topics include the gendered political economy of cinema, the female director as auteur, postfeminist fathe...
You are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate offers tantalizing essays immersed in the culture of food, expanded across genres, disciplines, and time. The entire collection of You Are What You Eat includes a diversity of approaches and foci from multicultural, national and international scholars and has a broad spectrum of subjects including: feminist theory, domesticity, children, film, cultural history, patriarchal gender ideology, mothering ideology, queer theory, politics, and poetry. Essays include studies of food-related works by John Milton, Emily Dickinson, Fay Weldon, Kenneth Grahame, Roald Dahl, Shel Silverstein, J. K. Rowling, Mother Goose, John Updike, Maxine Hong Kingston, Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich, Amanda Hesser, Julie Powell, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Martin Scorsese, Bob Giraldi, Clarice Lispector, José Antônio Garcia, Fran Ross, and Gish Hen. The topic addresses a range of interests appealing to diverse audiences, expanding from college students to food enthusiasts and scholars.
Questions of identity and identification are among the most important evolving concerns of contemporary cultural studies. Through processes of personal identification with discursively constructed subject positions, identities emerge across a wide range of cultural practices in the course of social interactions involving the use of language and other semiotic systems manifested in cultural artefacts of various kinds. The present collection includes a selection of papers on the topic of identity and identification in cultural studies today. Incorporating theoretical contributions and practical case studies, this monograph adds to contemporary debates on identity-forging practices from various...
“Provocative and diverse” essays on the image—and the reality—of feminism in the twenty-first century (Christine A. Kelly, author of Tangled Up in Red, White, and Blue). No matter what brand of feminism one may subscribe to, one thing is indisputable: the role of women in society during the past several decades has changed dramatically, and continues to change in a variety of ways. In You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, Lilly J. Goren and an impressive group of contributors explore the remarkable advancement achieved by American women in a historically patriarchal social and political landscape, while examining where women stand today and contemplating the future challenges they face worldwide. As comprehensive as it is accessible, You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby appeals to anyone interested in confronting the struggles and celebrating the achievements of women in modern society. “Some of the articles are down-to-earth, some are down-and-dirty. Some are matter-of-fact, others deliberately argumentative in tone. The book itself is a treasury.” —Lincoln County News
From Mean Girl to BFF, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood explores female sociality in postfeminist popular culture. Focusing on a range of media forms, Alison Winch reveals how women are increasingly encouraged to strategically bond by controlling each other's body image through 'the girlfriend gaze'.
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