Tag: yaoi


Nov
2015

New Issue: Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

categories: New Publications

RCOM_COVER_6-04.inddAcademic articles on comics, including manga, can – and certainly do – appear in a wide range of ournals. For example, just this year so far, the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, and Transformative Works and Cultures have all published such articles. However, several English-language journals cover comics exclusively. It is certainly reasonable to assume that they will welcome articles on Japanese comics.

The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Routledge), is probably the highest-profile such journal. It began publication in 2010, at first with two issues in each year’s volume, and has since expanded to four. Within the first year, it published Casey Brienza’s Producing comics culture: A sociological approach to the study of comics, a study of how “the conditions and mode of production help to determine the particular sorts of [comics] texts that are actually created” in the U.S. and In Japan, followed by three other individual articles, and a full “Boys’  Love manga (yaoi)” special section. And, two more articles on Japanese comics appear in the new December 2015 issue.

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Nov
2015

Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 1998 Ed.

categories: Bibliographies

Words of Japanese Popular Culture1998 saw a slight increase in the number of chapters on anime/manga published in edited essay collections – 7 compared to the previous year’s 5. Three of the seven appeared in the first English-language books on Japanese popular culture in general, alongside other chapters on topics such as sumo, karaoke, women’s magazines, live-action television series. The 11 articles on anime/manga that were published in 1998 issues of academic journals were a decrease from the 20 that appeared the year before, but once again, it was clear that major journals such as the Journal of Japanese Studies and the Journal of Popular Culture had accepted the idea that anime and manga were valid subjects of in-depth academic study.

As always, the following list will be permanently archived in the Bibliographies section of this site. If I identify any new publications, they will be added to the permanent list only, not to this post.

English-Language Academic Writing on Anime/Manga, 1998

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Oct
2015

Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 2006 Ed.: Part 1

categories: Bibliographies

Introduction

Animation 1-1Once again, for the next annual list of academic publications on anime/manga, covering 2006, I am breaking it down into two sections. This first one covers articles published in academic/scholarly journals, as well as “journals of opinion”, commentary magazines, and publications sponsored by Japanese government agencies and non-profit organizations. The second will include books and essay collections.

Particularly notable journal articles on anime/manga published in 2006 included Susan Napier’s Matter out of place: Carnival, containment and cultural recovery in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, in the Journal of Japanese Studies, one of the leading English-language journals in this area, two papers in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy – one introducing manga to teachers and the other, arguing that anime can have a distinct benefit for students of Japanese as a foreign language, in-depth studies of Full Metal Alchemist, Haibane Renmei, Memories, Perfect Blue, and Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning Spirited Away, and several essays, in different publications, on the appeal of “boys’ love” manga and anime to audiences both in Japan and in other countries.

Structurally, 2006 also saw the launch of both Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, the first peer-reviewed journal on animation published by a major for-profit publisher (with Platonic sex: Perversion and shojo anime (Part one), by McGill University’s Thomas Lamarre, in the inaugural issue), and the online-only, open access Animation Studies. In the years since, both of these journals have actively welcomed academic articles on Japanese animation, with almost 30 such articles between the two of them.

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Sep
2015

Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 2007 Ed.

categories: Bibliographies

Introduction

From Impressionism to AnimeIn terms of major new contributions to anime/manga studies, the highlight of 2007 was easily Susan Napier’s monograph From impressionism to anime: Japan as fantasy and fan cult in the mind of the West. Napier, the author of 2001’s Anime From Akira to Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, the first book-length academic study of Japanese animation to be published in English had more right than anyone to be called “the anime professor”, and with this volume she built up on her reputation and added to it. One reviewer called it “theoretically sophisticated, but eminently readable and respectful of fan culture”; another’s appraisal is “a wide-ranging but very accessible book [that is] a good introduction to a variety of historical Japan fads, and a helpful call to see them in relation to one another.”

2007’s list of of new chapters on anime/manga in edited essay collections consists of a total of 21 individual titles, including five in a collection specifically on animation, two in a book on “superhero” characters in literary and visual traditions around the world, and a particularly interesting study of Hayao Miyazaki’s work as not only a director, but as a master of adapting works from other media into the medium of animation.

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Aug
2015

Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 2008 Ed.: Part 1

categories: Bibliographies

So far, my workflow for building a freely accessible (and more importantly, close to comprehensive) directory of published English-language academic writing on Japanese animation and Japanese comics has consisted of compiling and posting annual lists of such publications – like the ones that are now available in the Bibliographies section. Needless to say, preparing a list that frequently contains more than 150 individual publications – verifying the titles and the names of the authors, confirming that the books are still in print and that individual articles are still available online, whether in open access or at least through a publisher’s website, correcting any spelling or punctuation errors in my original notes – takes a lot of time. So, In the interests of speeding up this process, I will try a new approach – of spreading these lists over several posts. Of course, once each annual list is complete, it will be added to the Bibliographies section for permanent archiving as well.

English-language academic publications on anime and manga: 2008, Part 1 – Journal articles (more…)


May
2015

Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 2009 Ed.

categories: Bibliographies

Since launching this project over a year ago, a significant portion of my work has gone towards presenting materials – such as lists of recent academic publications on anime/manga, that until now, have not been available anywhere publicly. With the lists now complete going back to 2010 – I can begin moving into the project’s next stage. This will involve going back into my own archives and the legacy Online Bibliography of Anime and Manga Research to extract and present lists of English-language scholarship on anime/manga published prior to 2010 – all the to 1977 – the year that the first such paper that I’m aware of was published. And, right now, I am pleased to be able to present the 2009 edition of the Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies.

As with all other editions of the Bibliography, it is also available as a separate page. Any further updates will be reflected on that page only, not in this post.

Introduction

In terms of new publications on anime/manga, 2009 definitely stood out for the relatively large number of books that were published over the course of the year. These included two separate monographs on the life and works of “God of manga” Osamu Tezuka, Thomas Lamarre’s intensely theoretical The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, with its strong call to shift the focus in anime studies away from an emphasis on either textual or anthropological/sociological readings, and towards an analysis that builds on the unique qualities of animation as an art form and a way of representation, two separate personal testimonials by anime industry professionals, and even a pair of titles on anime/manga in the Rough Guides series of popular reference handbooks. In addition, the year saw over 20 individual chapters on anime in various essay collections, and some 70 individual peer-reviewed articles, once again in a wide range of journals in fields including animation studies, comics studies, Asian/East Asian/Japanese studies, film studies, education, literature, media studies, and other areas of the humanities and social sciences. (more…)


Mar
2015

Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 2015 Ed.

categories: Bibliographies

Over the more than 10 years now that I have been tracking the development of anime/manga studies as an academic area in general, and new academic publications on anime/manga more specifically, I have presented my work in several different formats. A single fixed list or table was adequate when there were only a few dozen books, book chapters, and journal articles to highlight. But it would not be able an adequate way to present several hundred records. For a while, I was able to add new items to a database presented online using the DabbleDB platform. Since it was discontinued four years ago, I have compiled annual lists of new publications on anime/manga, and announced them at the end of each year. These lists for the years from 2010 to 2014 are now archived in the Bibliographies section of this site, and I plan to continue this work and present similar lists for the years prior to 2010 as well – in fact, the one for 2009 will be up in the next few days. At the same time, this blog now also makes it possible for me to maintain a running list of new publications on anime/manga – so, rather than assembling the list continuously but only releasing it in December or even next year, I can instead make the list of academic publications on anime/manga published this year available to the public right now, and update it continuously as new materials are published.

Annual Bibliography of Anime/Manga Studies, 2015 Ed.

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Mar
2015

Highlighting New Publications: Boys Love Manga and Beyond

categories: New Publications

Boys Love Manga and BeyondAs a particular genre in Japanese comics (and to a lesser degree, animation), Boys’ Love and the related generic/content label of yaoi has attracted significant scholarly attention from English-language scholars of Japanese popular visual culture. Boys’ Love, often abbreviated to BL, refers to texts with homosexual or at least homoerotic romance themes, created primarily by, and primarily for women. Yaoi is used generally for explicitly pornographic fan-created works, depicting sex between male partners, and using characters from established media properties such as novels, films, and anime/manga. Some of the ways that scholars are writing on BL/yaoi can be seen in book chapters such as Suzuki, Kazuko (1998), Pornography or therapy?: Japanese girls creating the yaoi phenomon, in S. Inness (Ed.), Millennium girls: Today’s girls around the world (pp. 243-267), and McHarry, Mark. Girls doing boys doing boys: Boys’ love, masculinity, and sexual identities, in T. Perper & M. Cornog (Eds.), Mangatopia: Essays on manga and anime in the modern world (pp. 119-133), and journal articles like Welker, James (2006), Beautiful, borrowed, and bent: “Boys’ Love” as girls’ love in shojo manga, Signs, 31(3), 841-870, McLelland, Mark (2006), Why are Japanese girls’ comics full of boys bonking? Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, 10, and Pagliassotti, Dru (2008), Reading Boys Love in the West, Particip@tions: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 5(2). In addition, out of the less a dozen edited collections of essays on anime/manga that have been published in English before this year, one specifically focuses on “Boys’ Love manga”.

The publication by the University Press of Mississippi of Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan now brings the number of English-language essay collections on shounen-ai/Boys Love/BL/yaoi to two. And the obvious question is – what makes this essay collection unique. Is it anyhow different from the already-published five years ago now Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre (Jefferson, NC: McFarland), or is it just more of the same?

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Feb
2015

Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 2010 Ed.

categories: Bibliographies

To the best of my knowledge, 2010 was simply THE high point to date of English-language scholarly interest in anime and manga, with 10 new monographs, 6 essay collections (with a total of well over a hundred chapters), 29 more chapters in other essay collections, and over 60 individual articles in scholarly-peer reviewed journals.

Particularly noticeable trends this year included:

  • With Open Court Publishing Company’s Anime and Philosophy and Manga and Philosophy essay collections, at accessible price points and distributed to general book stores, an effort to introduce the ideas and practices of scholarly approaches to Japanese animation and Japanese comics to general audiences.

As always, it is possible that this list is not absolutely complete – you are welcome to suggest additional titles to add.

And, as always, this list is also available as a separate page. Any new updates will be reflected on that page only.

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Dec
2014

Manga and the Manga-esque: New Perspectives to a Global Culture

categories: Programs

Manga and the Manga-EsqueThe Japanese Studies Program at Ateneo de Manila University (Manila, Philippines) has unveiled the full schedule for Manga and the Manga-esque: New Perspectives to a Global Culture, the program’s 15th Annual International Conference on Japanese Studies. The conference will be held at Ateneo de Manila University on January 22 and 23, 2015, and this year, it will receive support from the Women’s MANGA Research Project (Chikushi Jogakuen University) and also serve as the project’s 6th Women’s Manga Conference. Accordingly, the conference will significantly emphasize manga in general and manga’s female readers in particular both in Japan and in other Southeast Asian countries, including Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand.

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