Chick talk: (de)constructing chick lit and women's fiction

Women authors are accepted as valued (marketable) contributors to genre fiction and they are welcome to even subvert the tropes associated with these genres, thus we have a long established practice of narratives featuring female forensic investigators and private eyes, and female warriors in sci-fi and fantasy. Yet the women writing in the genre ‘chick lit’ are dismissed by the literary elite as ‘not real authors’ churning out contemporary versions of the ‘bodice ripper’. What I am attempting to discover in this paper is the elements that explain the popularity in the market of the ‘chick lit’ novel throughout western cultures. It is my contention in this paper that the phenomenon dubbed ‘chick lit’ is actually the mobilization of a backlash against the destruction of, and criticism directed towards the male literary hegemony. By looking at the fastest selling genres of women’s fiction I will attempt to answer this question as to if this is in fact a global phenomenon.