why aren't there more like this out there???, 17 Dec 2005
This book is excellent! I highly reocmmend it and wish there were more people writing on the chick lit phenomenon. I only wish this book were more geared toward the everyday reader, rather than toward the classroom.

why aren't there more like this out there???, 17 Dec 2005
This book is excellent! I highly reocmmend it and wish there were more people writing on the chick lit phenomenon. I only wish this book were more geared toward the everyday reader, rather than toward the classroom.

Metaphor, Gender and Religious Language, 28 Jan 2008
Janet Soskice's book is a collection of essays covering topics as diverse as feminism, being the image of God, friendship, Blood and defilement, calling God 'Father' and more. Although there are some common themes running through the book, particularly some bible verses, the overall effect was rather disjointed, particularly the chapter comparing St Augustine and Julian of Norwich's ideas of Trinity and the image of God which seemed very different than the other chapters.

The author's wide knowledge of Christian writers from Augustine to C S Lewis added a great deal of interest, as did her own occasional personal comments about the Christian life for a woman. Although enjoying the book, this reader would probably have benefited more from reading each chapter on a different day to fully appreciate the messages and thoughts, rather than trying to find an overall theme for the book in one reading.

why aren't there more like this out there???, 17 Dec 2005
This book is excellent! I highly reocmmend it and wish there were more people writing on the chick lit phenomenon. I only wish this book were more geared toward the everyday reader, rather than toward the classroom.

Metaphor, Gender and Religious Language, 28 Jan 2008
Janet Soskice's book is a collection of essays covering topics as diverse as feminism, being the image of God, friendship, Blood and defilement, calling God 'Father' and more. Although there are some common themes running through the book, particularly some bible verses, the overall effect was rather disjointed, particularly the chapter comparing St Augustine and Julian of Norwich's ideas of Trinity and the image of God which seemed very different than the other chapters.

The author's wide knowledge of Christian writers from Augustine to C S Lewis added a great deal of interest, as did her own occasional personal comments about the Christian life for a woman. Although enjoying the book, this reader would probably have benefited more from reading each chapter on a different day to fully appreciate the messages and thoughts, rather than trying to find an overall theme for the book in one reading.

Fascinating topic, but analysis is frustratingly muddled and mild, 19 Apr 2007
This is an absorbing topic and one underexplored by feminist critics: what impact has feminism had on popular women's fiction since the late 1960s? Imelda Whelehan's tenet is that feminism still shapes women's writing today (even if more obliquely than previously) because "its heroines often seem to be wrestling with a nascent feminist consciousness set against their quest for The One". Whereas the feminist bestsellers of the late 1960s and 1970s - e.g. Sue Kaufman's Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967), Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (1973) and Marilyn French's The Women's Room (1977) - were "directly in dialogue with feminism - often through the avowed feminism of its heroines", she contends that post-second-wave fiction still allows feminism a "shadowy presence" (although "openly feminist characters are often a source of discomfort for the others"). In her introduction, she already shows signs of indecision, though, conceding that most post-1970s popular novels by women do not comfortably qualify as 'feminist bestsellers' (they are rather commercial bestsellers predominantly read by women) and that her own consumption of chick lit is something of a 'guilty pleasure' that is 'difficult to write about in academic terms'. This is held out by her analysis. Her discussion of Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl (1962) (published when the author was 40 and married, prior to her stint as editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine) and the 'mad housewife' novels is interesting, but it is her discussion of contemporary fiction that ultimately runs into murky waters.

Along with other commentators of late (Diane Shipley, Jenny Colgan), Whelehan seems keen to join the vanguard of chick lit apologists, who defensively praise the genre and criticise its trivialisation, whilst frequently glossing over its deep ambivalence and how it might mirror and feed the devaluation of intellectualism and criticism and the rise of apolitical consumerism in Western societies. This results in an analysis that is frustratingly mild. Even the fictional self-referentiality of Marian Keyes (one of the most popular chick-liters writing today) is confusingly explained away as "as a defence against accusations about the homogenization of chick lit", when it could indeed be seen as retrograde and conservative - reinforcing rather than subverting the cliché that chick lit is navel-gazingly narcissistic and solipsistic. And why, we might ask - against the background of the publication of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City in 1996 - are men, in spite of two waves of feminism, still presented in such fiction as the holy grail for women? And what does the deep ambivalence of much chick lit reveal about the way female readers perceive themselves and live their lives today? With such questions in mind, it is difficult to concur with Whelehan's thesis that there is "a clear link between chick lit and the writings from the Women's Movement". Perhaps the post-feminist attitude of much chick lit and its successful TV offshoots to politics is more fittingly summed up by Samantha in Season 3 of Sex and the City: "I don't believe in the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party, I just believe in parties!"