WOMEN-CENTRED PROSE BEYOND GENRE LABELS: FROM CHICK-LIT TO EMOTIONAL ETHICS

Abstract

The article proposes a reconceptualisation of women-centred popular prose beyond established genre labels such as chick lit or women’s fiction. Genre-based approaches have been productive in mapping the emergence and commercial success of female-authored popular narratives since the late 1990s. Contemporary popular fiction increasingly focuses on emotional experience, care, and everyday ethical concerns. This article examines a selection of English- and French-language popular novels published in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and proposes a different approach to such texts. Instead of relying on established genre labels, it focuses on how these narratives are organised around a female point of view, everyday emotional experience, and changing value priorities. Special attention is given to the gradual shift away from postfeminist irony towards more open, emotionally attentive forms of narration, in which relationships, vulnerability, and responsibility play a central role. Taken together, these features allow women-centred prose to be discussed as a meaningful analytical category rather than as a fixed genre.