{"id":1662,"date":"2021-04-23T11:47:17","date_gmt":"2021-04-23T10:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/englitpostgrad\/?p=1662"},"modified":"2021-04-23T11:47:17","modified_gmt":"2021-04-23T10:47:17","slug":"romance-reading-group-contemporary-chick-lit-feminism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/englitpostgrad\/2021\/04\/23\/romance-reading-group-contemporary-chick-lit-feminism\/","title":{"rendered":"Romance Reading Group: Contemporary Chick Lit & Feminism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our next\u00a0Romance Reading Gr<\/a>oup<\/a> online session is based on Contemporary Chick Lit & Feminism!<\/p>\n

Our next 20\/21 session will be on next Thursday 29th April 2021 f<\/strong>rom\u00a017:30-19:00<\/strong>, so save the date in your calendars! It will be on:\"\" Contemporary Chick Lit & Feminism<\/strong>. RSVP via:<\/span><\/p>\n

https:\/\/romancegroup.wixsite.com\/home\/event-details\/contemporary-chick-lit-feminism<\/a><\/p>\n

This month, the Romance Reading Group will be dissecting the genre of chick lit by comparing a foregrounded chick lit text (Helen Fielding\u2019s <\/span>Bridget Jones\u2019 Diary <\/span><\/i>(1996)) with two newer chick lit novels (Ayisha Malik\u2019s <\/span>Sofia Khan is Not Obliged<\/span><\/i> (2015) and Candice Carty-Williams\u2019 <\/span>Queenie<\/span><\/i> (2019)), asking questions such as: What is chick lit? Is the term itself controversial or a reclamation? How does the genre connect to romance? Is an intimate relationship crucial to the plot? Are they feminist works, or do they encompass a sense of feminist ideology?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Celebrated and marketed as a \u2018Muslim Bridget Jones\u2019, <\/span>Sofia Khan is Not Oblige<\/span><\/i>d can be argued as a \u2018reworking\u2019 of classic chick lit text, <\/span>Bridget Jones\u2019 Diary<\/span><\/i>. So we ask the following question: to what extent is this technique a way of diversifying the genre of chick lit? Furthermore, <\/span>Queenie <\/span><\/i>has been frequently billed as \u2018<\/span>Bridget Jones\u2019 Diary<\/span><\/i> meets<\/span> Americanah<\/span><\/i>\u2019 and praised for being an inspirational, funny and, at times, dark exploration of Black womanhood, though this text is rarely deemed as chick lit. Why do you think that is? Does chick lit still exist? Has the genre changed, or just been reframed as \u2018contemporary women\u2019s fiction\u2019? By making the texts more \u2018feminist\u2019, have new authors strayed away from defining their fiction as \u201cchick lit\u201d? Is identifying themselves in alignment with other \u2018chick lit\u2019 texts \u2013 like <\/span>Bridget Jones Diary <\/span><\/i>– a way of implying that they are, in a way, chick lit, but do not want to be known in this way?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hope to see you on 29th!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our next\u00a0Romance Reading Group online session is based on Contemporary Chick Lit & Feminism! Our next 20\/21 session will be on next Thursday 29th April 2021 from\u00a017:30-19:00, so save the date in your calendars! It will be on: Contemporary Chick Lit & Feminism. RSVP via: https:\/\/romancegroup.wixsite.com\/home\/event-details\/contemporary-chick-lit-feminism This month, the Romance Reading Group will be dissecting … Continue reading “Romance Reading Group: Contemporary Chick Lit & Feminism”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":597,"featured_media":1663,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english-lit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/englitpostgrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/englitpostgrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/englitpostgrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/englitpostgrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/597"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/englitpostgrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1662"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/englitpostgrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1664,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/englitpostgrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662\/revisions\/1664"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/englitpostgrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/englitpostgrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/englitpostgrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/englitpostgrad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}