Is there such a thing as women’s popular literary fiction: or is there a move towards a transnational women’s genre fiction?

Australia has witnessed changes in the visual, performing arts and literary markets wrought by the demands of globalization. The Australian film industry has embraced the opportunities presented by access to overseas markets and expertise. For Australian literature however, the discourse is one of doom and gloom; rhetoric of crisis pervades the popular press and specialist broadsheet supplements. The ‘death of the literary novel’ is touted as a direct result of the push towards globalization of the publishing industry and the dominance in Australia of the big international houses and lists. It is the contention of this paper that the rhetoric of crisis articulated in Australian literary circles is actually a backlash against the deconstruction of and criticism of male literary hegemony. I argue also that this is a global phenomenon rather than one specific to the Australian literary scene. The popularity of ‘Chick Lit.’ as evidenced by global sales data, including in the growth within the small Australian market tells us that the readers of these novels inhabit a shared cultural space, irrespective of the novels’ countries of origin. Has the increase in the publication of ‘Chick Lit’ its basis in postfeminist times; a political backlash by the masculine hegemony in Western cultures seeking to encourage women out of the workplace and back into the realm of domesticity, and conservative heterosexual relationships? Or is this thematic commonality of the novels from the global literary–sistahood, especially within the Anglophone cultures, part of a post-feminist or postmodernist paradigm shift as a result of globalization?