Chick lit: the new woman's fiction

Part I. The hatching of a genre: origins and influences: Ch.1. Who's laughing now? a short history of Chick Lit and the perversion of a genre / Cris Mazza

Ch.2 Tradition and displacement in the new novel of manners / Stephanie Harzewski

Ch.3. Mothers of Chick Lit? women writers, readers, and literary history / Juliette Wells

Ch.4. Narrative and cinematic doubleness: Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones's Diary / Suzanne Ferriss

Part II. Free range: varieties and variations: Ch.5. "Sistahs are doin' it for themselves': Chick Lit in black and white / Lisa A. Guerrero

Ch.6. Long-suffering professional females: the case of Nanny Lit / Elizabeth Hale

Ch.7. You are not alone: the personal, the political, and the "new" Mommy Lit / Heather Hewett

Ch.8. Chick Lit Jr.: more than glitz and glamour for teens and tweens / Joanna Webb Johnson

Ch.9. Ya yas, grits, and sweet potato queens: contemporary Southern belles and the prescriptions that guide them / Elizabeth Boyd

Ch.10. Bridget Jones and Hungarian Chick Lit / Nóra Séllei

Part III. Sex and the single chick: feminism and postfeminism, sexuality and self-fashioning: Ch.11. About a girl: female subjectivity and sexuality in conteporary 'Chick' culture / A. Rochelle Mabry

Ch.12. No satisfaction: Sex and the City, Run Catch Kiss, and the conflict of desires in Chick Lit's new heroines / Anna Kiernan

Fashionably indebted: conspicuous consumption, fashion and romance in Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic trilogy / Jessica Lyn Van Slooten

Supersizing Bridget Jones: what's really eating the women in Chick Lit / Alison Umminger

Afterword: The new woman's fiction / Shari Benstock.