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The diary, understood as both a practice of communication and a writing format, has enjoyed a prominent position among the discursive strategies employed by the American feminist culture of the past two centuries. Adrienne Rich has aptly referred to it as "that profoundly female, and feminist, genre" (Rich, 217). In looking at the diary as a crucially feminist instrument of self-conceptualization and self-actualization, one might also assume that to some extent, changes in journaling practices reflect larger developments within the feminist project itself. In this essay, I offer a comparative textual analysis of two fictionalized accounts of women's diaries. Both case studies - Sharon Maguire's Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) and David Fincher's Gone Girl (2014) - originate from contemporary Hollywood cinema. Adopting the historical trajectory of the feminist diary as my starting point, I use the selected films' treatment of the diary to discuss two contemporary variations - postfeminist and postrecessionary, respectively - on feminist understandings of female identity and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Novels from the 18th and 19th centuries have powerfully shaped modern conceptions of marriage and family life. With the development of the British realist novel, the courtship and marriage plot took on a new cultural prominence that 'naturalized' a deeply cultural institution and normalized a particular set of heterosexual gender roles. The cultural significance of these novels can be measured by their reverberations in contemporary popular culture and their impact on modern life stories. Jane Austen's (1813/2002) Pride and Prejudice and Helen Fielding's (1996) popular adaptation of Austen's novel, Bridget Jones's Diary, offer family theorists and researchers a case study on the influence of canonical plot structures on modern stories about marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]