Oh, the nerve! The audacity! How dare a lit student presume to tell me about lit! Why! The sheer presposterousness! (no offence really, the rest of the post proceeds to just show how ignorant I am.)
Ok, I'm no expert on genre definitions. When I read, say, Tom Clancy, I'd probably shelve it under political thriller / books I don't read. When I read Jonathan Carroll, I'd shelve it under defies definition / fantasy horror. When I read
Romeo and Juliet, I'd shelve it under movie adaptations. So, as you can tell, I'm no expert.
So here's the story of
Emma, succintly put. Girl falls in love in the end, swooning involved. Now, that probably happened in quite a few stories, such as
Star Wars and various movies in the same genre or with Harrison Ford involved. I mean, when I pick up the book
Emma, and see the name Jane Austen, I think of what the target audience would be. Obviously, chicks, or men very in touch with their inner female / male lit students without a choice. When Austen wrote the book, it would obviously sell, for that was the period where literacy, especially amongst the middle class (women), was on the rise, thanks to the printing press. Novels, back then, were considered trashy. Poetry and drama were still something to be revered, and the novel something like the bastard child (the same way film was, before they invented Kurosawa). Let's say Gentleman A, of good repute, goes to buy a nice book to read. Placed next to each other is
Emma, by Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen (again), and
The 50 Greatest Horse Carriage Explosions Caught By Pencil, by Really Q. Artist. If he was shopping for a lady of the house, he'd buy 1 or 2 books (depending on his budget / how much he loved the woman or wanted her to read and hence shut up), by Jane Austen, but if he were to enjoy a good read (in his own opinion, and probably mine) he'd get the book with nice carnage involved.
Things haven't really changed. Now we have cars, of course. I'm not saying that Austen is entirely chick lit, no, it's no way like Fabio Does France and Fabio Does France Again (After not being able to think of other places starting with F), or even any of those stories with very chiseled men on the cover carrying a lady off to the sunset. It's also nothing like the slightly more modern variation, where they have sex for fun (yes! not only guys do that!) and/or discuss Manolos. But still, the target audience is still female, it involves a very engaging/simple love story which is the whole aim of the book and well, yeah.
So, in my general opinion it's chick lit. That's not to say it's not a classic! No siree! Jane Austen is rather ranked up there, if not by me, then by thousands and millions of other people. It is a classic.
It's also classic chick-lit.
