Originally a euphemism '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. Harzewski examines such best sellers 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. The book is a historicization of this major pop-cultural phenomenon, and Harzewski 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.
This volume gathers contributions from academics, activists, and practitioners throughout the world to explore non-monogamous relationships. Featuring both empirical and theoretical pieces, contributors examine the history and cultural basis of various forms of non-monogamy, experiences of non-monogamous living, psychological understandings of relationship patterns, language and emotion, the discursive construction of mono-normativity as well as issues of race, class, disability, sexuality and gender.