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This chapter discusses the sale of Rover to the German car maker, BMW. The disappearance of Austin, Morris, and Triumph badges reflected Rover's market strategy aim of moving upmarket. BL's wide model range had been narrowed considerably. Accordingly, the firm's traditional objective of high market share and annual volume to achieve economies of scale gave way to a strategy of profitable unit pricing and high capacity utilization and productivity rates.

In the study of medieval manuscripts, an individual scribe’s patterns of change may emerge as knowable, analysable features that display creative involvement. If, added to this circumstance, a single scrivener possesses a sizeable amount of surviving output, opportunities to know that scribe as an specific ‘author’ in the process of cumulative composition expand greatly. The study of vernacular literary manuscripts has now reached a point where many scribes with large and interesting oeuvres have been identified. By designating a new category, ‘literary scribe’, we can differentiate these special scribes from the many other unknowable copyists, and allow their oeuvres to be analysed in ways analogous to the criticism applied to authors. Case studies are provided for two important literary scribes: the Ludlow scribe who created British Library, MS Harley 2253, fols 49–140, and Robert Thornton of Yorkshire, who created Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91 and British Library, MS Additional 31042.

A chivalric miscellany, such as the ‘Grete Booke’ commissioned by Sir John Paston II in the 1460s, can be classified according to the likely use its owner made of it, or intended to make of it, even though this will be very difficult to determine. One complication is that people who wish to acquire prestige by associating themselves with a book, whether a contemporary fanbook or a medieval miscellany, may themselves be uncertain as to the socially acceptable limits of the codicological category. Medievalists have sometimes referred to highly personal miscellanies as ‘commonplace books’, but this term is best reserved for books that actually were composed of commonplaces, short pieces of widely accepted wisdom. There were many kinds of chivalric miscellanies, and the terms we employ offer tentative judgements on the purpose and control of the original patron or owner.

Based on interviews with 30 female readers of BL (Boys’ Love) manga in Taipei, this chapter analyzes the BL scene in Taiwan from the perspective of its social utility as a discursive arena enabling women collectively to think through transforming social ideologies around gender and sexuality. This form of participatory pop culture is most interesting, the author argues, not because of any unilateral subversiveness vis-à-vis culturally dominant understandings of (feminine) gender or (homo)sexuality. Rather, it is important in providing a space for the collective articulation of young women’s in-process thinking on these questions. The chapter also engages with the Japaneseness of the genre as consumed in Taiwan in order to consider the imaginative function that its perceived cultural “otherness” performs.

This chapter examines heterosexual male readership of Boys Love (BL) in Japan. It draws heavily from Yoshimoto Taimatsu's study, Interviewing Fudanshi (Fudanshi ni kiku)—fudanshi (rotten men) being the term used to refer to heterosexual male readers—and extends his analysis of the discursive queerness reflected in heterosexual male readings of male homosexual narratives such as BL. Although it might be assumed that it is primarily gay men who are interested in these homoerotic narratives, as the chapter points out, gay men have had a sometimes problematic relationship with BL. As early as 1992, a “yaoi debate” (yaoi ronsō) emerged in feminist media wherein some gay spokesmen criticized women writers for appropriating and misrepresenting gay relationships and desire. The chapter also describes how the fudanshi demonstrate a subconscious psychological male desire for self-feminization through male readers' identification with those images of seemingly gay men that were originally designed by and for women.

This chapter explores the ways in which critical issues of representational appropriation are belittled by way of both apologetic gesture and shielding. This chapter's analysis is twofold: while critiquing the separation between fantasy and reality—“they do not represent gay men in reality”—it aims to critically reflect upon this perspective in order to better understand the elements intrinsic to the genre. The fraught relationship between gay men and Boys Love (BL) creators goes back to a 1992 article by gay critic Satō Masaki, who argued that BL represented misappropriated gay romance. Gay men also observed that the protagonists deny or repudiate homosexuality since it is important for the female readership that these characters experience an exclusive attraction to each other. Despite engaging romance, these characters reject homosexuality and are often troubled by feelings of guilt or repulsion, as if same-sex love were a bad thing.

This chapter discusses the works of manga artist Yoshinaga Fumi, whose narratives are an endlessly interpretable relationship that provides a window on gender and sexuality. It argues that Yoshinaga is a “master chef” of manga who prepares wonderful dishes for a diverse range of textual consumers and connoisseurs. Working within the Boys Love (BL) and related genres for both commercial and dōjinshi publications, Yoshinaga depicts food, gender, and sexuality in order to affirm and celebrate desires and gratification, while at the same time presenting acute critiques of the kinds of consumption that involve or nurture discrimination against, and subjugation of, one group of people by another. The chapter highlights three of Yoshinaga's popular series produced at different times in her career, with differing degrees and methods of adopting or transforming BL conventions: The Moon and the Sandals (Tsuki to sandaru), Hana oto (Flower sound), and Antique Bakery (Seiyō kottō yōgashiten).

This chapter addresses cultural responses to Boys Love (BL) texts, including both manga and light novels, in the context of broader conservative critiques of manga, anime, and related popular culture. It points out how manga have often been targeted by moral campaigners due to its content. Since the late 1980s, following on from a moral panic occasioned by the serial killing of four infant girls by avid manga collector Miyazaki Tsutomu, manga and anime content has increasingly been governed by a code of industry self-regulation, but this does not apply to the self-published dōjinshi scene, which includes many BL writers. The chapter discusses two recent incidents: the 2008 furor over the large number of BL titles available for loan in a library district in Osaka, and the 2010 debate in Tokyo over the “Non-Existent Youth” Bill aimed at using zoning laws to restrict the sale of erotic and pornographic manga.

This chapter discusses the prehistory of Boys Love (BL) by analyzing the works of Taisho period (1912–1925) artist, Takabatake Kashō. The period saw significant economic and technological growth that resulted in major advances in education. A vibrant literary culture developed, especially around popular monthly magazines aimed at differing readerships such as housewives, businessmen, and boys and girls. Kashō, one of Japan's best-known illustrators, presented boys as young, beautiful, and sometimes effeminate-looking male figures that project an air of homoeroticism due to also having made illustrations of older men. These male figures attracted interest among female readers. Noting that such images were featured in girls' magazines, such as Shōjo no tomo (Girls' friend), the chapter suggests that it was precisely the absence of women in the frame of these pictures—and hence their homoerotic charge—that attracted girl readers.

This chapter explores the emergence of the genres that is predominantly used to label Boys Love (BL). It first turns to the works of the Fabulous Year 24 Group (Hana no nijūyo'nen-gumi), also known as the “Fabolous Forty-Niners,” who created the genre shōnen'ai in the 1970s. The group's narratives were printed in mainstream shōjo manga magazines and featured male protagonists in same-sex romantic and sexual relationships. The first of these narratives were placed in romanticized European settings. It then discusses the emergence of yaoi in the 1980s. Short for yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi, the genre was known for the relatively plotless original narratives and parodies replete with implied or roughly depicted male-on-male sex. The chapter concludes with a description of the JUNE genre, which is named after a popular shōjo magazine, and the BL genre—the first to use other media forms such as drama CD's and light novels.

This chapter demonstrates how yaoi and Boys Love (BL) developed as an entertaining space where women can “play with gender,” and the constraints of oppressive female gender roles can be removed. A central feature of yaoi which affirms this is the seme–uke rule, that is, the norms whereby characters in a relationship are determined to be the seme—the “attacker,” that is, the dominant and insertive sexual partner—and the uke—the “receiver,” that is, the passive and receptive sexual partner. Yaoi and BL flourishes then as accumulations of experiments carried out in shōjo manga—experiments in transgressing every possible border of sexual difference and in creating worlds of diverse polymorphic perversion. Additionally, the chapter argues through yaoi and BL, the women's appropriation of male characters is an example of girls' agency in imagining sexual scenarios, including sadomasochism and rape, that have traditionally been considered the reserve of male sexual fantasy.

This chapter discusses the problems that emerge from the proliferation of different terms referring to genres of male-male romance writing in Japan. Drawing from the insights of Boys Love (BL) light novel writers and manga artists, it argues that a failure to distinguish between genres can not only lead to confusion on multiple levels, but also impede the development of research that uses the genres as variables to explain a distinct social phenomenon associated with each. The chapter also presents their perceptions on the other subgenres of BL. In discussing the categories shōnen'ai, tanbi, JUNE, yaoi, and BL, the interviewees stressed both chronological and narrative content difference between these terms. For instance, they associate the traditional term shōnen'ai with the pioneering manga by the Fabulous Forty-Niners, while tanbi (aesthetic) literature for them is most associated with themes explored by “aesthetic” authors such as Thomas Mann and Oscar Wilde in Europe.

This chapter examines Boys Love (BL) studies in Japan, highlighting Nakajima Azusa's paper Communication Dysfunction Syndrome (Komyunikēshon fuzen shōkōgun). Published in 1991, this research paper is considered to be the first full-fledged critical analysis of Japanese BL. Nakajima's self-reflexive analysis evokes a number of important questions, including that of why significant numbers of Japanese women crave male homosexual narratives. Her study argues that women who are consistently exposed to a normative masculine gaze in the context of a partriarchal society attempt to elide their female bodies—and such socially imposed paradigms as female beauty, motherhood, and the reproductive function of sex—by taking refuge in the idealized sphere of male homosexual fantasies. The chapter also looks into the studies of Fujimoto Yukari, who asserts that, in BL works, the problematic aspects of female sexuality unquestionably involve an impulse to escape the pain associated with being passive in sexual acts.

This chapter continues the discussion of Boys Love (BL) studies by interrogating BL narratives as feminist-utopian pornographic fantasies, with an analysis of the works of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and Michael Foucault. It looks at feminist theories of how fantasy works in women's pornography in order to challenge the common perception that pornographic imagery is necessarily degrading or demeaning. The study relates to the false perception that participating writers and readers of BL are fujoshi, the “rotten girls,” who are sexually deprived in real life. To highlight this reading, it also contrasts the essentially narcissistic autoeroticism of Modernist writer Mishima Yukio's obsession with three-dimensional male bodies with female BL artists/readers' fascination with the flat, two-dimensional bodies of fantasized male BL characters. The absence of female characters in the BL text entails the negation of their own female bodies, and thus enables an erotic autonomy that is not tied to any specific viewpoint or sexual identity.

This chapter explores how female fans of Boys Love (BL) manga in Japan talk to one another about relationships between fictional male characters, which they find not only pleasurable, but also productive of new ways of interacting with the world of everyday reality. It offers a fascinating glimpse into the fujoshi world by presenting information gathered from BL consumers. The bulk of their discussion is devoted to moe-banashi or “moe” talk), where they converse affective relationships between not only fictional male characters, but also animate and inanimate objects. A term literally meaning “to bud,” moe refers to the erotically charged interest that manga and animation fans feel for fictional characters. The chapter notes how the informants are constantly on the lookout for moe moments inspired by real and fictional people and events, and the shared nature of these moments means they are transforming the relations they see in the world around them.