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Chick lit is a term used to describe a type of popular fiction targeted at young women. Widely used in the 1990s and 2000s, the term has fallen out of fashion with publishers, while writers and critics have rejected its inherent sexism. Novels identified as chick lit typically address romantic relationships, female friendships, and workplace struggles in humorous and lighthearted ways. Typical protagonists are urban, heterosexual women in their late twenties and early thirties: the 1990s chick lit heroine represented an evolution of the traditional romantic heroine in her assertiveness, financial independence and enthusiasm for conspicuous consumption. The format developed through the early 1990s on both sides of the Atlantic with books such as Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale (1992, US) and Catherine Alliott's The Old Girl Network (1994, UK). Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996, UK), wildly popular globally, is the "Ur-text" of chick lit, while Candace Bushnell's (US) 1997 novel Sex and the City, adapted to a well-known television program, has huge ongoing cultural influence. By the late 1990s, chick lit titles regularly topped bestseller lists, and many imprints were created devoted entirely to it. By the mid-2000s, commentators noted that its market was increasingly saturated, and by the early 2010s, publishers had largely abandoned the category. Nonetheless, the term "chick lit" persists as a popular category of fiction for both readers and amateur writers on the internet. While the concept of "chick lit" has become outdated in developed-world English language literature, the term, and regional derivations of it, continue to be widely used to describe and analyse popular women's literature in other languages and other parts of the world. Origins and derivations of the term In 1992, Los Angeles Times critic Carolyn See was probably the first to spot that a new style of popular women's fiction was emerging. Though she didn't use the term chick lit, in a review of Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale, the critic noted that McMillan's book was not "lofty" or "luminous" but was likely to be highly commercially successful. Carolyn See wrote, "McMillan's new work is part of another genre entirely, so new it doesn't really have a name yet. This genre has to do with women, triumph, revenge, comradeship." Chick lit did not become an established term for a style of novel until the second half of the 1990s. "Chick" is American slang for a young woman, and "lit" is a shortened form of the word "literature." There was probably no single origin of the term: Princeton University students were reported in 1988 to use chick lit as slang for a course on the Female Literary Tradition and, in the UK, Oxford Reference report that the term arose as a "flippant counterpart" to the term "lad lit". The parallel term used for movies, chick flick, enjoyed slightly earlier uptake. In what was probably one of its first major outings, the term chick lit was deployed ironically: Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction was a 1995 anthology of 22 short stories written in response to editors Cris Mazza's and Jeffrey DeShell's call for "postfeminist writing." Early use of the term was heavily associated with journalism (both Bridget Jones's Diary and Sex in the City began as newspaper columns) and James Wolcott's 1996 article in The New Yorker, "Hear Me Purr," co-opted the term chick lit to proscribe what he called the trend of "girlishness" evident in the writing of female newspaper columnists at that time. In the early years, there was some variation on the exact term used: in 2000, the Sydney Morning Herald reported the birth of a "publishing phenomenon" that can be called "chick fiction." At the peak of the term's popularity, a slew of related sub-genres were proposed with similar names chick lit jr (for young readers), mommy lit, and chick lit in corsets (historical fiction, and a term only found in one academic paper published in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies). The relationship with the term lad lit is more complicated: lad lit arose in the UK separately from, and possibly before, chick lit. Later, the term lad lit was adopted in the US for a male-oriented subgenre of chick lit (see lad lit). Of these parallel terms, mommy lit, and lad lit are the only terms to have enjoyed any significant uptake - and that a tiny fraction of the use of the primary term chick lit. Other derivations of the term chick lit have been used to describe varieties of popular women's literature in different regions, or targeted at specific ethnic communities. In the US this has included "Sistah lit" targeted at black readers and "Chica lit" for Latina readers. In India the term "Ladki Lit" has been used (see below). In Turkey, çıtır literature is a category (çıtır literally means 'crispy', but is colloquialy used to refer to attractive young women) Writers and critics Controversy over chick lit focused at first on the literary value of books identified or promoted as part of the genre. Over time, controversy has focused more on the term itself, and whether the concept of a chick lit genre is inherently sexist. In 1998, reviewer Alex Kuczynski, writing for The New York Times, condemned Fielding's novel in particular, writing: "Bridget is such a sorry spectacle, wallowing in her man-crazed helplessness, that her foolishness cannot be excused." In 2001, writer Doris Lessing deemed the genre "instantly forgettable" while Beryl Bainbridge called the genre "a froth sort of thing". Author Jenny Colgan immediately fired back at Lessing and Bainbridge, explaining why, for a new generation of women, chick lit was an important development: We really are the first generation who have grown up with education as a right; with financial independence; with living on our own and having far too many choices about getting married (while watching our baby boomer parents fall apart), having children (while watching our elder sisters run themselves ragged trying to do everything), and hauling ourselves up through the glass ceiling. Who reflects this? Growing up in the 1980s all we had to read if we wanted commercial fiction, were thick, shiny, brick novels covered in gold foil, in which women with long blonde hair built up business empires from harsh beginnings using only their extraordinary beauty and occasionally some goldfish... With BJD, for the first time, here we were. The first time I read it, it was an absolute revelation to see my life and confusion reflected in print. Two years later Colgan had turned strongly against the term chick lit, being the first to state what is now a mainstream position among writers of women's popular fiction: she rejected the term chick lit while defending the cultural value of her work. She observed, "Chick-lit is a deliberately condescending term they use to rubbish us all. If they called it slut-lit it couldn't be any more insulting." Much of the debate at this time was between.... Discover the Catherine Alliott popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Catherine Alliott books.