It's academic

August 18, 2010 7:37 PM

I'm looking for academic/scholarly/somewhat-serious articles discussing anime and/or manga.

There are plenty of blogs out there devoted to anime and manga. Some of them good and some of them not so much. But I wanted to know if there any particularly interesting pieces written on the subjects, either from an academic standpoint or even from a good blog that's not rabidly ZOMG-ing over all the pretty anime boys and girls. (Not that I'm against fan-girling/boying, it's just that there's a time and place for it.)

I'm interested in writing on these topics and want to see what is already out there.

Thanks!

posted by joyeuxamelie to Education (8 answers total)

You might like the Online Bibliography of Anime and Manga Research.
posted by wintersweet at 7:45 PM on August 18, 2010

Google Scholar search for anime
Google Scholar search for manga

You often can learn a lot from the abstracts if the PDFs aren't available. Feel free to memail me if there's an article or two you want but you don't have access.
posted by emilyd22222 at 7:49 PM on August 18, 2010

Are books on manga okay? For a Japanese pop culture class, I read Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics! by Frederik L. Schodt and Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle, Updated Edition: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation by Susan J. Napier. The first mostly discusses the long history of manga, while the latter is an introduction to the social and cultural impact of anime and manga. Also, if you look at the "Customers also bought" section, you'll see a lot of other books on anime and manga.
posted by millions of peaches at 7:59 PM on August 18, 2010

Have you read any of the work put out by Susan J. Napier? She's a professor at UT-Austin that has put out a couple of well researched books on anime.

Anime: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation

Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult

The Fantastic In Modern Japanese Literature
posted by BZArcher at 8:00 PM on August 18, 2010

How about Mechademia?
posted by mariokrat at 8:35 PM on August 18, 2010

The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature is more about books than anime and assumes that the reader is familiar with the canonical 20th century authors. Impressionism to Anime does have more about anime, but is mostly about Japonisme.

What are you interested in writing about?
posted by betweenthebars at 10:35 PM on August 18, 2010

Matt Thorn is an academic who studies and translates shojo manga - not only is his site a place to start but you can probably contact him and get more references.

Matt Thorn.com - main site

And his if you are writing a paper and have a question read this first page.
posted by batgrlHG at 10:41 PM on August 18, 2010

Nthing Napier's books. She is now at Tufts University, a move made right before I was to start her anime class at UT Austin. Bitter? Maybe just a bit.
posted by vilandra at 9:13 AM on August 19, 2010