Chick Lit and the Narrative Construction of Post-Feminist Femininities

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ralf Schneider
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 396548976

This project inquires into the narrative evocation of femininities in contemporary British and Irish popular romance fiction, in particular in the most successful subgrenre, Chick Lit. Chick Lit novels deal with the personal, professional and romantic routes to selfhood of female protagonists, who are usually between 22 and 40 years of age and live in a setting that is portrayed as post-feminist, and mostly urban. The project starts from the contention that it is particularly popular literary genres with their wide distribution that influence social constructions of reality and feed into social discourses (in the sense of M. Foucault). In the present case, Chick Lit novels can be understood to be complicit in creating the dominant contemporary post-feminist, neo-liberal patterns of female identity and behaviour, including the power relations that underlie these patterns. The aim of the project is to analyse, from a cultural studies and literary perspective, the genuinely narrative means by which these novels produce and evaluate these conceptions of femininities, with all the ideological bias that situates them beyond mere entertainment. The project is a contribution to the paradigm of feminist narratology. However, it does not pursue the road of much previous research on popular women's fiction with its focus of images of women and its either quite mimetic or psychoanalytic conceptions of literature. Rather, the study aims to link from social criticism, sociological, discourse analytical and narratological research questions; thus, it will shift the focus towards an inquiry into how the forms and modes of narration become culturally functional and relevant in the construction of gender-related identities, truths, and normativities. The corpus of the analysis is the first to reach the most recent present.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants