'Cosmopolitan' culture and consumerism in contemporary women's popular fiction

This dissertation focuses on the recent literary phenomenon, popularly known as chick lit, and the way in which this genre interfaces with women's advice manuals. This trend in popular fiction, which began with the publication of British author Helen Fielding's novel Bridget Jones's Diary (1996), chronicles the romantic tribulations of its heroines. Critics of the genre have failed to fully appreciate chick lit's complicated representations of women as both readers and consumers. This literature questions the "consume and achieve promise" offered by women's advice manuals and argues that chick lit's response to the gendered ideologies of advice manuals is complex. In a variety of ways, chick lit seeks to challenge cultural expectations about women as consumers, readers, and writers, and about popular fiction itself.; Each chapter highlights the dialogue between selected chick lit texts and a chosen set of advice manuals. Chapter Two examines how Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones's Diary) and Sophie Kinsella (Confessions of a Shopaholic) respond to women's magazines. By constructing protagonists who are ideal readers of women's magazines and commenting ironically on their behaviors, these novelists mock the advice of such publications. Chapter Three explores self-help books, Melissa Bank's The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing, and Laura Zigman's Animal Husbandry. Bank and Zigman write heroines who serve as models for readers suffering from emotionally draining relationships and, in doing so, create alternative, fictionalized self-help manuals. In Chapter Four, I discuss how Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City and Carol Wolper's The Cigarette Girl respond to romantic comedies by revealing the limitations of female sexuality posited by these films and by presenting an alternative sexual-behavior model for readers. Chapter Five considers how chick lit characters read domestic-advice publications in the hopes of achieving the sentiments associated with domesticity. My afterword synthesizes my observations about female consumption and reading practices through the lens of Sherrie Krantz's website and novel. Krantz's texts, like the other chick lit texts in this study, deconstruct the categories of "consumer culture" and "literature," blur distinctions between such agents as "consumer" and "reader," and challenge readers' expectations about women's writing.