Yaoi, also known as boys' love and its abbreviation BL, is a genre of fictional media originating in Japan that features homoerotic relationships between male characters. It is typically created by women for women and is thus distinct from bara, a genre of homoerotic media marketed to gay men, though yaoi does also attract a male audience and can be produced by male creators. Yaoi spans a wide range of media, including manga, anime, drama CDs, novels, video games, television series, films, and fan works. While "yaoi" is commonly used in the west as an umbrella term for Japanese-influenced media with male-male relationships, "boys' love" and "BL" are the generic terms for this kind of media in Japan and much of Asia.
Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex. While the term "slash" originally referred only to stories in which male characters are involved in an explicit sexual relationship as a primary plot element, it is now also used to refer to any fan story containing a romantic pairing between same-sex characters. Many fans distinguish slash with female characters as a separate genre, commonly referred to as femslash.
A romance novel or romantic novel generally refers to a type of genre fiction novel which places its primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and usually has an "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending." Precursors include authors of literary fiction, such as Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Brontë.
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.
Buffy studies, also called Buffyology, is the study of Joss Whedon's popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and, to a lesser extent, its spin-off program Angel. It explores issues related to gender, family, ethics and other philosophical issues as expressed through the content of these shows in the fictional Buffyverse.
Romance Writers of America (RWA) is an American non-profit writers' association founded in 1980. Its mission is to "advance the professional and common business interests of career-focused romance writers through networking and advocacy and by increasing public awareness of the romance genre." Relevant works must be themed around the development of a romantic relationship between two people, and there must be a happy ending. As well as published authors, those with complete but unpublished manuscripts are eligible for membership.
Jennifer Crusie is a pseudonym for Jennifer Smith, an author of contemporary romance novels. She has written more than twenty novels, which have been published in 20 countries.
The Wordsworth Circle is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering studies of literature, culture, and society in Great Britain, Europe, and North America during the Romantic period from about 1760–1850. It covers work on the lives, works, and times of writers from that period, including publications and publishers. The journal includes work on non-literary figures and topics —anything that appeared during, impinges upon, or is of interest to Romanticists. Essay-reviews of major books appear in the fourth issue of every volume. Subscriptions include membership in the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association. The journal is published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Boston University Arts & Sciences Editorial Institute.
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal that was established in 1993. It covers "work in the disciplinary fields of literary criticism and theory, philosophy, and cultural studies." Since 1998, it has been published by Routledge. The editor-in-chief is Pelagia Goulimari, who was also the founding executive editor. In 1996, the journal was named "Best New Journal" in the annual awards of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
The African Studies Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering African studies. The journal also publishes book and film reviews.
Antonia Darder is a Puerto Rican and American scholar, artist, poet and activist. She holds the Leavey Presidential Endowed Chair in Ethics and Moral Leadership in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University. She also is Professor Emerita of Educational Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Pam Rosenthal is a Brooklyn-born author of erotic historical romance novels. Under the pseudonym Molly Weatherfield, she has written erotic novels in the BDSM genre.
Ann Herendeen is an American author of popular fiction. Herendeen's novels are notable for their queering of the traditional romance novel.
Emily Toth, a Robert Penn Warren Professor of English and Women's Studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, is a scholar, novelist, advice columnist, and feminist activist. She earned her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Toth's scholarly work includes over 300 articles and papers about academic mentoring, Louisiana literature and culture, women's humor, and music; biographies of the American women writers Kate Chopin and Grace Metalious; a cultural history of menstruation; edited collections of Chopin's papers and last short story collection, and a volume of essays about regionalism in women's writing. Toth's historical novel Daughters of New Orleans (1983) was named a "Best Feminist Historical Novel" by Romantic Times in 1984. Toth was also the founder and editor of the journal Regionalism and the Female Imagination from 1975-1979 and on the editorial board of the journal Southern Studies.
Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region is a semi-annual peer-reviewed academic journal covering the history of Atlantic Canada. The current editors-in-chief are Erin Morton and Peter Twohig. It is published by the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick, with articles in either English or French. The name Acadiensis originated with an earlier periodical with the same name, a general interest quarterly magazine for the Maritime provinces, with an emphasis on local history. It was published in Saint John, New Brunswick by David Russell Jack from 1901 to 1908 but failed due to insufficient financial support.
Welcome to Temptation is a contemporary romance written by Jennifer Crusie and released in 2000. The novel explores the love story between Sophie Dempsey, a screenwriter making a movie in the small town of Temptation, and the mayor, Phinneas "Phin" Tucker. Over the course of the story, they solve a murder and deal with conflict around Sophie's movie, which is alternately a documentary or a porn flick. The lead characters appear in supporting roles in the sequel, Faking It, which centers on Sophie's brother, a secondary character in Welcome to Temptation.
Bet Me is a contemporary romance novel written by Jennifer Crusie. It won a Romance Writers of America Rita Award for Best Contemporary Single Title in 2005.
Lisa L. Moore is a Canadian-American academic and poet. She earned a B.A. in English with honors at Queen's University in 1986, and then completed her doctorate at Cornell University in 1991. Principal themes in Moore’s work include the centrality of love between women to literary genres such as the novel, the landscape arts, and the sonnet; the transatlantic and multi-racial history of feminist art and thinking; and the importance of poetry to second-wave feminist, womanist, and lesbian cultures and politics.
Robert Mayer is a New York Times-bestselling author and the CEO of Cool Gus Publishing. He is a West Point graduate and former Green Beret. Mayer has authored over 60 novels in multiple genres, selling more than 4 million books, including the #1 series Area 51, Atlantis, and The Green Berets. He has written under the pen names Joe Dalton, Robert Doherty, Greg Donegan, and Bob McGuire. He holds the distinction of being the only male author on the Romance Writers of America Honor Roll.
Celebrity Studies is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Routledge which focuses on the "critical exploration of celebrity, stardom and fame". Founded in 2010 by media studies academics Sean Redmond and Su Holmes, Celebrity Studies is the first scholarly journal dedicated to the study of celebrity. The debut of the journal reflects a growing scholarly interest in the field following the proliferation of research on celebrity since the 2000s. Upon its announcement, the journal was met with negative media and academic reception. The journal has since helped legitimize the study of celebrity and is regarded as the preeminent journal in its field. The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) shortlisted Celebrity Studies for the Best New Journal award in 2011.
