Fall 2025 Course Details:

In the last quarter century, the popular fiction “chick lit” has assumed gargantuan proportions, infiltrating into the mystery, paranormal, and young adult genres as well as the subsets mommy lit and hen lit (the latter, however unfortunately named, aimed at the over-forty reader). With Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary as master plots, the genre has figured prominently in the culture wars since the late 1990s: the anthologies This Is Not Chick Lit and its rejoinder, This Is Chick Lit, for example, defend competing agendas for the function of the woman writer and the purposes of fiction. This course offers a sustained examination of this postmodern subgenre and shows how these urban period pieces provide an ethnographic report on a shift in the climate of feminism. It seeks to understand the social conditions that gave rise to chick lit, a new incarnation of the courtship novel, and to explain its continued popularity.  Through online chats, a course blog, and diverse types of essays, we will work to decode the ways in which this type of qualitative sociology negotiates romantic and economic concerns, ones dramatized in the literary antecedents of Jane Austen and Edith Wharton.

The below texts will be discussed in significant length.  Hard copy or e-boom is acceptable.

1. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. (Recommended edition: The Annotated Pride and Prejudice, ed. David Shapard. Anchor.)*
2. Barker, Jo. Longbourn.
3. Gilbert, Elizabeth.  Eat, Pray, Love.*
4. Wharton, Edith.  The House of Mirth.*

*=free pdf edition included in the course modules  

• This course satisfies the Genres or Theory requirement for ENGLISH Majors. 
• This course satisfies a Post-1800 Literature requirement for ENGLISH LITERATURE, ENGLISH: TBD, ENGLISH/LAW 3+3, ENGLISH/JOURNALISM Majors.
• This course satisfies the "One English Course in Writing, Linguistics, Critical Theory, Film or Literature" requirement for ENGLISH TEACHING Majors.