The myth of superwoman

"Reviled by the critics but loved by the readers, the bestseller has until recently provoked little serious critcal interest. In The Myth of Superwoman Resa Dudovitze looks at this international phenomenon, particularly at the origins of the bestseller system in the United States and France. Her cross-cultural study including interviews with publishers, literatry agents, and bestselling authors, gives a lively picture of the contrasting ways in which the bestseller is produced, marketed, and received in two countries. It pays special attention to the international bestsellers of the 1980s to writers like Judith Krantz, Colleen McCullough, and Barbara Taylor Bradford ... Dudovitz shows how women's best selling fiction has, over the last two hundred years, kept pace with the social evolution of contemporary women, culminating in the myth of superwoman in women's bestsellers of the 1980s."--from back cover.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.