The Death of Chick Lit?

Laura Miller poses that question at Salon.

From the article...

These were gothics, a subgenre of romantic suspense, which was (sort of) a subgenre of romance. (Also: The gothic is not to be confused with the venerable literary mode referred to as the Gothic.) Taking their pattern from original works like Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” the drugstore paperback gothics were highly formulaic tales of shy young women who came to work in stately manors full of strange doings and ominous secrets. These novels were once a mainstay of the pulp market, and publishers churned them out. (The Marxist critic Raymond Williams was said to be very fond of them.)

You can still find battered old gothics in junk shops and used bookstores, but as an instantly identifiable genre they’re no longer being published. Other expired genres, one-time staples of train-station book stalls and corner newsstands, include the exotic adventure yarn (perfected by writers like H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs) and the inspirational rags-to-riches bildungsroman now identified exclusively with Horatio Alger. Other genres, like the western, are still being published, but just barely.

What kills a genre isn’t always clear. Supposedly, the readership for the western turned to urban crime fiction sometime in the 1970s. Why? Were they simply tired of cowboys and gunslingers, or had the myth of the Old West been too thoroughly undermined by counterculture critics and Native American activists? Other genres, like a certain flavor of softcore fictional titillation epitomized by the stewardess “memoir” “Coffee, Tea or Me?” — naughty, but not quite explicit enough to qualify as “adult books” — were made superfluous by the increased availability of straightforward porn.