Interrogating the Happily Ever After: research approaches

For those of you who are actually reading these posts on my 'Happily Ever After' exploration, I thank you for coming along for the ride and I do hope I'm not boring you to tears. One of my sneaky reasons for posting these blog posts is in the hope that I can encourage some of you modern erotic writers to consider taking your passion and your interest in the genre into the academy – because there's basically fuck all there. And because, I believe, it deserves to be there. Our genre deserves to be examined and explored and written about. One of the struggles I'm having with doing this kind of work is that I have a lot of opinions, a lot of questions, a lot of strategies for exploring the function of the 'happily ever after' ending, but very little experience in academic writing. So I'm learning as I go along. There are really four elements to my research process. Four questions I need to answer. What methods do I propose to use to dig into this subject? What methodology – why is this method the right one for the questions I'm asking? That theoretical perspective will I take [...]