January 27, 2011: Chick Lit and Postfeminism Explored in New Book 
Chick Lit and Postfeminism (Cultural Frames, Framing Culture)
by Stephanie Harzewski
University of Virginia Press, 2011
Reception and book signing on Thursday, January 27, from 5 to 6:15 p.m. in Murkland 110.
Sponsored by the Women's Studies Program and the College of Liberal Arts. All are welcome.
From book cover: Originally a euphemism for Princeton University's Female Literary Tradition course in the 1980s, "chick lit" mutated from a movement in American women's avant-garde fiction in the 1990s to become, by the turn of the century, a humorous subset of women's literature, journalism, and advice manuals. Stephanie Harzewski examines such bestsellers as Bridget Jones's Diary, The Devil Wears Prada, and Sex and the City as urban appropriations of and departures from the narrative traditions of the novel of manners, the popular romance, and the bildungsroman. Further, Harzewski uses chick lit as a lens through which to view gender relations in U.S. and British society in the 1990s. Chick Lit and Postfeminism is the first sustained historicization of this major pop-cultural phenomenon, and Harzewski successfully demonstrates how chick lit and the critical study of it yield social observations on upheavals in Anglo-American marriage and education patterns, heterosexual rituals, feminism, and postmodern values.