Arpf

Chick-lit Revisited

Today it would be zombies.  The study of popular fiction requires us to identify the trends of a particular cultural moment, not just the bestseller per se but its influence and impact on popular narrative media, its retail management, audience reception and interaction with the social construction of knowledge.  Ten years ago it was chicklit and Joanne Knowles, in her introduction to the special issue for the ARPF journal Diegesis, predicted: “The next steps in chicklit research should be exciting ones.  Without a Radway-style examination of the readers of these fictions, it remains difficult to comprehensively evaluate the way these fictions fit into, distort or influence women’s everyday lives, conceptions of culture and views of feminism.  I am confident, however, that more work on analysing chicklit’s readers, markets and generic developments will appear in the coming years, and hope that this collection forms a useful starting point for debate.  The ephemerality of the genre will, I am sure, continue to be proclaimed; however, investigations of the continuing media debate about these representations of contemporary female experience – its authenticity, anxiety and sociological reality – need not be thought of as trivial concerns any longer”.  I certainly did not expect that demands for this issue would outlive its print run.

 Amongst several provocative and challenging ideas that Sean Cubitt presented to a recent seminar about studying film in an age of digital reproduction was the notion that our generation, by committing to digital ephemera, will leave nothing accessible to future cultural historians.  The electronic versions of Diegesis: The Journal of the Association for Research in Popular Fictions are even within ten years either lost or corrupted and as the print editions become exhausted, I have resorted to photocopying the archive copy of the Knowles special issue to send out to new researchers.   The issue on chicklit was the first to go out of print and is the one that is most often in demand.  Whilst preparing to upgrade to a new system I found that there was an earlier pre-publication version stored inadvertently on an elderly laptop and thought that it would be useful to put the issue online and save on the photocopying.  To do so has required reproducing the final corrections and relearning an earlier approach to producing copy.  Therefore I am prepared to agree with Professor Cubitt and on the way to producing the pdf,  now on the Romance section of the ARPF website, I frequently contemplated just typing the whole thing out again as a quicker and more accurate process.

 The issue, as its editor Joanne Knowles explains, grew out of a colloquium held on or around Valentine’s Day in 2003.  Knowles felt that “the open, questioning atmosphere was refreshing. Media and academic discussions of chicklit often tend to become consumed by the question of how chicklit can be stopped in its tracks, rather than looking at what it actually does, and how”.  Although Knowles was thinking of the significance of journalists as cultural critics, I think that the comment also marked an attitude to researching the popular through validating singular, exceptional artefacts rather than a willingness to explore the dynamics of mass culture, which is still integral to its reception in more polite academic circles.  The issue was put together using Diegesis “as a forum where the longevity or otherwise of chicklit does not have to be justified as a pre-requisite to analysing it as a cultural symbol.  Its significance as part of a particular moment in the cultural landscape and the popular fiction market can be acknowledged without negotiating its canonical value” and researchers still turn to it because although chicklit is a cultural reference point, active publishing concern and influence on emerging formulae for women’s writing it lacks informed debate in everyday academic life and work.  ARPF hopes to act as one possible conduit for this debate, which even in the digital age is often conducted in a fragmented fashion by researchers working alone and seeking out connections with points of reference like the chicklit edition of Diegesis. At our conference on research methods and themes later this year, we may also be able to further such debates about cultural moments, whether they relate to chicklit, zombies or whatever comes next.

 Note: ARPF would be very interested to hear from researchers working on chicklit. Please leave comments here or, if you wish, email your contact information and details of your project to us at arpfmail@yahoo.co.uk  .

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