Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
use alternate worlds to explore and challenge social boundaries and defini-
tions related to gender. Among African American writers, Octavia Butler’s
Earthseed series and Nnedi Okorafor’s Zahrah the Windseeker (2005) and
The Shadow Speaker (2007) will lend themselves well to discussions related to
race and culture, as well as to gender. Students interested in exploring gender
should pay particular attention to the ways women writers reformulate the
narrative structures of genre fiction. Helpful secondary sources include Anne
Cranny-Francis’s Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (1990),
Merja Makinen’s Feminist Popular Fiction (2001), and Payant’s chapter on
Marge Piercy. The first two studies include useful discussions of the structural
features and conventions of genres. They also consider women’s reformulations
of detective novels, another genre women writers appropriate for feminist con-
cerns. Showalter also addresses female detectives in chapter 19 of A Jury of Her
Peers.
- A more recent female genre to emerge in American fiction is “chick lit,”
which was initiated by the publication in 1996 of Bridget Jones’s Diary,
by the English writer Helen Fielding. These wildly popular works feature
single women—usually white—in their twenties and thirties who struggle
with insecurities about their looks and in relationships with men, while also
trying to succeed professionally. Buoyed by warm friendships and often
the comfort of material goods, they eventually find the self-acceptance
that allows them to succeed both in love and work. The genre, however, is
not without its detractors. For example, in her New York Times column “Of
Divas and Ditzes: Gone with the Diary” (28 April 2001) Maureen Dowd
criticized chick lit as vacuous, apolitical, and consumerist. Suzanne Ferriss
and Mallory Young, however, argue for the legitimacy of chick-lit stud-
ies because it focuses on concerns “dear to cultural critics’ hearts” such as
the relationship between identity and sexuality; consumer capitalism; and
race, ethnicity, and class. Even more to the point, chick lit deals with issues
essential to feminism, such as the pressures on women to balance work with
intimate relationships.” Students may wish to weigh in on this debate or
simply examine a work’s treatment of one or more issues related to femi-
nism. Students may also be interested in variations by ethnic writers, such as
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s “chica lit” novel The Dirty Girls Social Club (2003),
Erica Kennedy’s “sistah lit” novel Bling (2004), or Sonia Singh’s Goddess for
Hire (2004). In addition to gender, these works express the concerns of the
specific cultural communities in which they take place. Students may also
wish to compare the treatment of an issue—body image, relationships, fam-
ily, or work—depicted in an example of chick lit to that of an earlier work
such as Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. How do works from different decades
treat similar issues? What concerns remain the same for feminists? How do
they reflect differences between second- and third-wave feminisms?
- Women writers have revised the traditional bildungsroman^ to highlight the
social construction of female identity. In the classic bildungsroman the male
protagonist’s identity is at first shaped by the social environment, but he
eventually becomes aware of its pressure and rebels against it. The traditional
