Entries tagged with publications and presentations

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New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays

I'm so pleased! New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays will be out imminently.

Despite the prejudices of critics, popular romance fiction remains a complex, dynamic genre. It consistently maintains the largest market share in the American publishing industry, even as it welcomes new subgenres like queer and BDSM romance. Digital publishing originated in erotic romance, and savvy on-line communities have exploded myths about the genre’s readership. Romance scholarship now reflects this diversity, transformed by interdisciplinary scrutiny, new critical approaches, and an unprecedented international dialogue between authors, scholars, and fans. These eighteen essays investigate individual romance novels, authors, and websites, rethink the genre’s history, and explore its interplay of convention and originality. By offering new twists in enduring debates, this collection inspires further inquiry into the emerging field of popular romance studies.

One of those essays is by me: '“Why Would Any Woman Want to Read Such Stories?”: The Distinctions Between Genre Romances and Slash Fiction'. This essay comes from a paper that began six years ago as a conference paper helped on by Kristina Busse, and I'm so happy to see it reaching this new milestone. So much thanks to Kristina, and to Eric Selinger and Sarah Frantz, for helping me to get it this far. Order from your local indie bookstore or order from Amazon.

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archival description in OAI-ORE

Along with Anne Sauer and Eliot Wilczek, I've just had a new paper published: "Archival Description in OAI-ORE", in the Journal of Digital Information, a free, green open access journal. This is a version of a paper which we presented last year at Open Repositories 2010, and mercifully, has been greatly improved since the draft of the paper I wrote while running a temperature of 102°.

This paper, by the way, is our attempt to COMPLETELY REVOLUTIONIZE ARCHIVES AND CHANGE THE LAWS OF PHYSICS. Sort of. Revolutionize archival description using new technology, anyway. Changing the laws of physics will have to wait until we get grant funding.

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new encyclopedia, excellent blog

yAt! My copy of the encyclopedia Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Robin Anne Reid, has arrived. I wrote the essay "Girls and the Fantastic" and the short entries for Ursula LeGuin and Raphael Carter. I'm so pleased by it, and will shelve it right next to my Oxford encyclopedia of children's literature.

In other news, I'd like to encourage you to check out the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives blog (

tufts_dca), especially if you like photo blogs.

lamentables, I'm looking at you! We post about once a week, and most of the posts involve an awesome picture from our archives. For example, my most recent contribution there, "Disaster!", features a fabulous photo of Jumbo the Elephant looking just a tad battered.

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where is Pueblo, Colorado when you need it?

Public.Resource.org's suggestions to Obama's transition team on improving public domain access to government resources are fabulous. I hadn't known about FedFlix [FedFlix on the Internet archive, Fedflix on YouTube], but what a fabulous resource: Public.Resource.org and NTIS teamed up together to make public domain digital copies of many government videotapes.

Or how about their idea for The Library of the USA, which would not only create a fantastic archival series of curated documents, but would be a nice New Deal-style public works jobs program in a time where even libertarians are beginning to realize we need one.

And nobody can deny that right now high-speed Internet access is part of enfranchisement in modern society, and a program to bring high-speed Internet to more rural parts of America would be fabulous.

We are in prime time to do both so much good and so much harm. Traditionally, government information has been printed by the GPO, an organization which knows that its mandate from United States code includes permanent public access, and knows that all work of the United States government is in the public domain. Their digitization efforts include an understanding of the public domain. But these days, the US government publishes many documents directly to the Web, without involving the GPO, and the individual departments responsible for that publication can be unaware of their responsibilities to the public. Comedians make jokes about Dick Cheney and his shredder, but the problem goes beyond illegal government programs and secret laws. Evil people will always do evil, and it's our responsibility to stop them, but a lot of what's going on now is just carelessness and ignorance. If government departments don't know they have a responsibility to publish into the public domain, if by bypassing the FDLP with direct-to-Web publication they don't realize they are bypassing a mandate to permanent public access, then it doesn't take any evil whatsoever to deny the public our right to permanent access to these public domain materials.

Some government offices, such as the Government Accountability Office, are already on the right track. Let's make sure the new administration keeps us going the right way.

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at the intersection of children's literature and queer theory

The essay I co-wrote with Rebecca Rabinowitz, "'Beautiful, or thick, or right, or complicated': Queer Heterosexuality in the Young Adult Works of Cynthia Voigt and Francesca Lia Block", has been published. The collection is Straight Writ Queer: Non-Normative Expressions of Heterosexuality in Literature (Amazon, Powells, Table of contents). I haven't read the rest of the essays, but I'm excited to. Calvin Thomas wrote the introduction to the book, too!

I'm very proud of this essay. It's the first -- but not the last -- formal compilation between me and Rebecca (although we've helped each other extensively on our prior work).

And here's another plug for Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (McFarland, Table of Contents, Amazon, Powells, Henry Jenkins Review, Rebecca Tushnet Review). I say with no false modesty that I think most of the essays in this book are way better than mine -- not because mine is bad, but because this collection is so damn good.

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non-library publication

The book Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, is now available for purchase from the McFarland web site. My essay in this book is called "Construction of Fan Fiction Character Through Narrative", and I'm rather proud of it, if only because most of the writing in fan studies is about community and my essay is much more a close reading of the fiction itself than anything else. (I have Kristina Busse to thank that it draws on community at all, instead of being nothing but close reading, and because of her contributions it is a much stronger essay.)

The other essays in the collection are all excellent. If you're at all interested in fan studies, take a look at the book.

Our two early reviews make me dance:

"Innovative explorations of fandom and new media...marvelous...a much-needed record of developments in contemporary fan practices. Anyone wanting to learn more about media fandom—where it’s come from and what it means today—will need a copy" —Matt Hills, author of Fan Cultures and How To Do Things With Cultural Theory

"What is especially impressive here is the focus on collaboration or collective story telling. The essays speak to how fan authors relate to the inspiring texts and their authors, how they deal with issues of intellectual property, how they fit within larger literary traditions, how fan authors deal with both canon and fanon, and how fan authors interact with each other in terms of collaborative authorship. This book gets me excited about the whole field all over again. I learned something fresh and interesting in every chapter"—Henry Jenkins, author of Textual Poachers

I don't know when my other forthcoming essay in a compilation is due, although it is ironically also McFarland, even though it is not about fan studies at all. That one I cowrote with Rebecca Rabinowitz, and is about queer heterosexuality and children's literature. Don't worry, I will be sure to kvell about it here when it comes out.

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Console-ing Passions 2006

I've just come back from a conference, and even though it wasn't a library conference, I think it's interesting to post about here; in fact, there are some issues that arose at the conference which I think are of interest to librarians. Console-ing Passions is a feminist media studies conference. While there is ostensibly a focus on new media, most of the panels I attended had to do with traditional forms of interacting with more traditional media, such as television, news media, and the like. Even many of the panels which focused on the Web treated the more static forms of media still created by an editorial team. Don't get me wrong, many of the panels were extremely good and I enjoyed the conference, but there wasn't a lot of emphasis on social networking. Facebook and Myspace got mentioned in passing several times, but I only went to one panel (decides the two fanfiction panels with which I was involved), which really focused on user-created content. That panel had two papers about message boards and one about identity creation on Friendster.

I think there's a good space open for a crossover conference that covers issues of social networking. From a literary analysis perspective I'm primarily interested in the texts which are the product of social networks; as a librarian I am interested in various forms of communication and information sharing that social networks enable. I assume media scholars would also be interested in social networking but that's not my field of expertise, I'm afraid.

In any case, it was absolutely wonderful to me my fellow panelists in person, when before I only knew them online (and in the case of

kbusse, on the telephone). Everyone had great things to say, and I've great ideas about this paper and more. Now I just need to find an OA humanities journal to submit the paper to. *g*

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open access and the humanities

I'm finishing up a paper which I will be presenting at Console-ing Passions in a few weeks, and I'm trying to maintain both the longer, reference-full version for later publication as well as the panel version. I feel like I should be putting my scholarship where my mouth is, which means I should be looking for an open access or green journal for publication. But for some rather obvious reasons, there is much more pressure to produce open access year-reviewed journals in the sciences than in the humanities, and the papers I write are such niche publications anyway. I need to find an open access humanities journal which will take a literary criticism article of the type that is usually only interesting to media and culture studies people. This will be an entertaining research project.

On an entirely nonlibrary related note, today is turning out to be an entirely hands-free day for me, mostly because I was an idiot over the weekend. You know, dictation is wonderful, but it really hurts my brain when it's the only way I'm allowed to control a computer. It's not difficult, it's just exhausting. Its neural exercise, and it hurts.