From Chick Lit to Fragrant Literature and Back

Autor(en)

Sandra Folie

Abstrakt

Chick lit, an Anglo-American genre of popular fiction, is said to have gone global since its emergence in the mid-1990s. This chapter focuses on Indonesian sastra wangi (fragrant literature), an especially early and frequently cited ›global variant‹ of chick lit from the Global South. While many of the prototypical chick lit novels, depicting young professional women in search of Mr. Right, sold very well, the sexually and politically explicit sastra wangi also won prestigious awards. Most notably, Ayu Utami’s novel Saman (1998) has been translated into nine languages, earning its creator a place among Indonesia’s ten most translated authors. Considering these remarkable accolades, equating sastra wangi with chick lit and thus genre fiction is rather surprising and suggests a reevaluation in the context of its global circulation. This chapter applies the circulation method, a polycentric comparative strategy by Susan Friedman, to study the actors and processes involved in sastra wangi’s ›chick-lit-ization‹.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft

Publikationsdatum

2022

ÖFOS 2012

602053 Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, 504014 Gender Studies

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Literature and Literary Theory

Link zum Portal

https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/from-chick-lit-to-fragrant-literature-and-back(5f84d8d4-f677-494b-bf7e-83b045d15aec).html