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Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit focuses on the literary phenomenon popularly known as chick lit, and the way in which this genre interfaces with magazines, self-help books, romantic comedies, and domestic-advice publications. This recent trend in women’s popular fiction, which began in 1996 with the publication of British author Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Diary, uses first person narration to chronicle the romantic tribulations of its young, single, white, heterosexual, urban heroines. Critics of the genre have failed to fully appreciate chick lit’s complicated representations of women as both readers and consumers. In this study, Smith argues that chick lit questions the "consume and achieve promise" offered by advice manuals marketed toward women, subverting the consumer industry to which it is so closely linked and challenging cultural expectations of women as consumers, readers, and writers, and of popular fiction itself.
Joanna Bourke takes the issue of rape out from the academic ghettos and distills the truth so often exploited to sell newspapers. Neither prurient nor overly sympathetic, she investigates rape from a historical standpoint examining the history of sexual aggression, the idea of rape as a social construct, and the often–ignored idea of embodiment, and analyzes the physical response of rapists as well as the often–cited "rape is about power" theories. Indebted to a growing body of sophisticated feminist analyses about rape victims, Bourke here shifts the emphasis from the victims to the perpetrators in order to place rapists in their historical context. An invaluable study, this book delivers the hard truth that if we are to imagine a world free of unwanted sexual violence, then we must consider the issue of rape from every angle.