This dissertation examines the reasons behind the striking success of 20th/21st century popular women's fiction, also known as chick lit, and investigates the genre as a site for cultural globalization. I study questions of consumerism, the global movement of capital, and the global circulation of popular literature and culture as manifested in chick lit. I triangulate chick lit, classics, and commodity in my examination of global Anglophone texts and I maintain a transnational focus in my study: commodity worship in literary and popular fiction; female protagonists in Indian and Indian diasporic chick lit as commodities exchanged in marriage; and the commodification of Jane Austen--the "founder" of chick lit--through the transcultural derivatives of her novels. My project fills the lacunae left by prior research by providing a sociological analysis of chick lit's commercial success in the global literary market, an exploration of cultural politics in an ethnic offshoot of mainstream chick lit, an investigation of the genre's supposed celebration of consumerism from a cultural studies angle, and tracing the trajectory between Austen and chick lit texts in terms of transitions in socio-economic conditions of contemporary women. Chapter 1 analyzes a two-part survey (web-based and personal interviews) on chick lit readership through Stuart Hall's Encoding/Decoding model to examine whether chick lit manipulates passive readers into conforming to the dominant ideology encoded in the genre about heterosexual marriage, femininity, and consumerism, and concludes that readers exercise negotiated readings of chick lit.Chapter 2 explores the relationship between consumerism and its importance to self-making in chick lit through a cultural studies framework, and demonstrates that chick lit critiques reckless consumption instead of celebrating it. I discuss the trajectory of consumerism from Edith Wharton and Anita Loos to contemporary chick lit novels.Chapter 3 examines Indian chick lit where the "Westernized" protagonists of post-liberalisation India need to occupy an Indian traditional cultural realm due to societal pressure. I suggest that Indian chick lit is a site of glocalization of Western principles with Indian culture, where the protagonists attain Homi Bhabha's idea of cultural hybridity to enjoy liberal values in conjunction with a sense of the Indian national identity. Chapter 4 explores the transcultural transdiegetizations of Jane Austen's novels as products of the commodification of the original texts which are used to source chick media plots for the readers'/viewers' consumption, and which glocalise elements of Austen's plots. The use-value of the Austen text to the chick lit writer is its importance as a resource for "raiding" it for aspects which can be extended or accentuated, and thereby produces the exchange-value of the chick media texts.
Read
