Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. What did Women want?: Post-war masculinity in the woman's novel of the 1950s
3. 'Mothers Without Partners': the single mother narrative of the 1960s
4. She's Leaving Home: the 'college girl' narrative of the 1970s
5. Shopping as Work: the sex and shopping novel of the 1980s
6. Keeping the Home Fires Burning: the Aga Saga of the 1990s
7. Shopping for Men: the Single Woman narrative
8. Resentful Daughters: the post-feminist novel?
9.Afterword Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

The paperback edition of major survey of popular women's fiction by wide range of North American and British writers.

About the Author

Deborah Philips is Professor of Literature and Cultural History at the University of Brighton, UK. Her books include Fairground Attractions (2012), The Trojan Horse (2013) with Garry Whannel and Brave New Causes (1999) with Ian Haywood.

Reviews

"Deborah Phillips has produced a most welcome addition to the existing critical work on the "woman's novel", which is to say the novel written by women that constructs its readers as feminine...Women's Fiction 1945-2005 uses many of the approaches that we have come to associate with Cultural Studies and offers an enjoyable sense of time travel for those who are old enough to remember the decades in the second half of the twentieth century..." - Maroula Joannou, Contemporary Women's Writing

'Deborah Philips' study...is an invaluable text, deftly weaving literary history with cultural critique, social commentary, feminist analysis. Philips has achieved something truly remarkable in this intelligent, savvy, and provocative work of literary and cultural inspiration.' Dr. Suzette Henke, Thruston B. Morton, Sr. Professor of English, University of Louisville

'Deborah Philips' study of what she terms women's "domestic romance" from 1945 to 2005 is both entertaining and perceptive, at once engaging and nicely judged. She looks at the shifting sub-genres through the decades, amongst others, single mother novels in the sixties, sex and shopping fiction in the eighties, aga sagas in the nineties, and chick-lit up to the present day. This is a welcome addition to feminist engagement in the field. Astute, full of sharp political insights and alert to recent cultural theory, it is a sparkling and persuasive account of the changing concerns and tropes of women's popular fiction.' - Professor Helen Carr, Goldsmiths College, University of London.

"Her study will be welcomed by many women who have also read and enjoyed 'middlebrow' novels alongside 'highbrow' counterparts. It reveals the cultural currency of feminine popular fictions, and elucidates the pleasures they offer, without denying their occasionally serious limitations."
*Times Literary Supplement*