Chick Talk: (De)Constructing Chick Lit and Women's Fiction

By:
Carol-Anne Croker
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In Australia, Chick Lit is a sub-genre of general fiction is as yet to have a separate classification by Neilson Bookscan, whereas Erotic Fiction does. In Australia we have two authors whose work is situated within this latter sub-genre, Tobsha Lerner and Linda Jaivin, whereas in “Chick Lit” the number of titles expands almost weekly. What defines this sub-genre is thematic. Academics and polemicists have described the content as ranging from ‘the personal, the political and the new mummy’ (Heather Hewitt) or ‘nanny lit’ (Elizabeth Hale), tales about ‘shopaholics and conspicuous fashion consumption’(Jessica Lyn Van Slootin) and ‘clit lit’ or less controversially the new novels of manners.


Keywords: Feminist poetics, Creative writing, Novel, Genre fiction, Chick Lit, Erotica, Phallocentricism
Stream: Books, Writing and Reading
Presentation Type: 30 minute Paper Presentation in English
Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Carol-Anne Croker

PhD, Division of Higher Education, Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Victoria, AUSTRALIA

As a mature age PhD student I am interested in Creative Writing and feminist poetics. I am currently completing a novel and exegesis for my Doctoral Studies. I am researching psycho-analytical theories as they are relevant to writers, as well as feminist theory and post-modern poetics. These theories inform my fiction writing as I strive to write of the disconnection between language and life in contemporary Australia and the impact of recent history and social constraints on my female protagonists. My work is considered subversive and destabilising. I am hoping to forge a connection between women's fiction and literary fiction for a transnational genre fiction for women readers, or more simply put democratising the popular novel dealing thematically with the domestic and internal realms experienced by women.

Ref: B07P0020