Chicklit

I have come across the controversial term chicklit several times over the past couple of years. For me the term conjures up visions of trashy beach novels written by Jackie Collins. To learn the actual definition and origin of the term I turned to Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. They state chicklit is a term used to denote a genre of popular fiction written for and marketed to young women, especially single, working women in their twenties. The genre's creation was spurred on, if not exactly created, in the mid-1990s with the appearance of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones Diary and similar works; it continued to sell well in the 2000s, with chick-lit titles topping bestseller lists and the creation of imprints devoted entirely to chick-lit.

I found it amusing that the term includes a reference to Chicklet. Aside from its obvious source (chick is an American slang term for young woman and lit is short for "literature"), the term "chick-lit" includes a reference to Chicklets brand chewing gum, with the implication that readers of the genre are likely to be clichéd, unintellectual females who chew gum and avoid "serious" literature.

I also discovered that there is a similar term for male fiction ~ dicklit - The male equivalent, spearheaded by authors such as Ben Elton, Mike Gayle, and Nick Hornby, has sometimes been referred to as lad lit or dick lit.

After further research, I have concluded that the term which came into popularity with Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones Diary now seems to encompass all literature targeting a female audience including books written about single woman in their twenties that spend all there free time shopping for shoes. The dilemma is not necessarily what novels fall into the chicklit genre, the problem is that authors who write chicklit need to produce a better novel so that all chicklit is not dismissed as fluff.

To read the Wikipedia entry in its entirety please go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_lit.