'Millicent Weber, author of Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture, aspires to bring the scholarly field of book publishing together with DarntonWatch—a promising new podcast designed to support researchers and disseminate cutting-edge knowledge and practices within the industry.' (Introduction)
'#RomanceClass is a community which encompasses the authors, readers, actors, and artists who consume, produce, and enact mostly self-published English-language romance fiction in the Philippines. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in 2019, this article explores the key characteristics of #RomanceClass, including the ways in which positions itself in relation to the dominant North American conception of the romance novel and publishing industry, so as to build new understanding of how romance fiction is created and negotiated outside of this hegemonic context. It finds that #RomanceClass operates as an “intimate public” [Berlant in The female complaint: the unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture, Duke University Press, Durham, London, 2008], which intrinsically affects the community’s texts and practices.' (Publication abstract)
'Discussion about the production and distribution of comics by Australian creators is a rare sight in any form, especially within an academic context. This remains the case despite a move by the general population towards celebrating diverse forms of pop culture and the gradual rise of comics studies as a legitimate field of research over the last two decades. The absence of such discussion may lead one to question whether Australian works of the medium actually exist in any substantial number—even within the country, local comics stores are stacked with international imports and any film adaption of a comic book is predictably tied to foreign origins. However, despite this lack of prominence in the public and academic eye, the production of comics is hardly absent in the country; Australian stakeholders have contributed to the medium’s modern history since the 1970s. In Amy Louise Maynard’s doctoral thesis A Scene in Sequence: Australian Comics Production as a Creative Industry 1975–2017, this little-explored network of comics creators, producers, editors, sellers, cultural intermediaries and the scene they create is provided significant academic attention for the first time in a decade. By framing this network as a creative industry, Maynard provides an extensive examination of historical and contemporary Australian comics production.' (Introduction)
