Postfeminist Discursive Formations in Chick-Lit: Towards a Typology of Narrative Practices

The article examines contemporary chick-lit fiction from a perspective that moves beyond fixed genre definitions.Although the label chick-lit is still common in publishing and criticism, many recent Anglophone and Francophone novels linked to it no longer rely on romance, irony, or lifestyle aspiration as their main organising principles.Instead, they focus on everyday emotional experience, care, vulnerability, and long-term relational responsibility.The study examines a selection of popular novels by English-and French-language authors in which genre conventions are present only marginally or lose their organising role altogether.The analysis considers narrative voice, focalisation, evaluative language, and recurring thematic patterns.Instead of moving toward clear resolution, these texts often stay with fatigue, illness, grief, emotional dependence, and the ongoing effort of sustaining relationships.These tendencies appear across both Anglophone and Francophone material, despite differences in language and cultural context.What connects these novels is not a shared plot structure but a shared orientation toward emotional attentiveness and ethical engagement.As irony becomes less central and care gains narrative weight, the interpretive focus shifts away from genre features toward narrative practices.On this basis, the article proposes the concept of women-centred prose as a more productive analytical category for describing contemporary popular fiction written by women.The term highlights how meaning is shaped through sustained attention to emotional experience and relational life, rather than through adherence to genre-based expectations.It allows these narratives to be approached through how experience is organised within situations, interaction, and everyday routines.