Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure

ISBN-13: 9781780767376 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 288 str.

Helen Wheatley

Opis

In terms of visual impact, television has often been regarded as inferior to cinema. It has been characterized as sound-led and consumed by a distracted audience. Today, it is tempting to see the rise of HD television as ushering in a new era of spectacular television. Yet since its earliest days, the medium has been epitomised by spectacle and offered its viewers diverse forms of visual pleasure. Looking at the early promotion of television and the launch of color broadcasting, Spectacular Television traces a history of television as spectacular attraction, from its launch to the contemporary age of surround sound, digital effects, and HD screens. In focusing on the spectacle of nature, landscape, and even our own bodies on television via explorations of popular television dramas, documentary series, factual entertainment, and ambitious natural history television, Helen Wheatley answers the questions: what is televisual pleasure, and how has television defined its own brand of spectacular aesthetics?

Recenzje

An eminently readable book with strong examples that support its fundamental argument that visual pleasure is intrinsic to television aesthetics and practice ... Wheatley [provides] comprehensive research and articulate analysis. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies

Spis treści

TABLE OF CONTENTSIntroduction: What is spectacular television? What is (tele)visual pleasure?Part I Spectacular Histories, Spectacular TechnologiesChapter 1: Television comes to town: The spectacle of television at the mid-twentieth-century exhibition and beyondChapter 2: Spectacular colour? Reconsidering the launch of colour television in BritainPart II Spectacular Landscapes and the Natural World: Exploring beautiful televisionChapter 3: At home on safari: Colonial spectacle, domestic space and 1950s televisionChapter 4: Visual pleasure, natural history television, and televisual beautyChapter 5: Television's landscapes, (tele)visual pleasure and the imagined elsewherePart III Spectacular Bodies and (Tele)visual PleasureChapter 6: Fascinating bodies: Looking inside television's somatic spectacleChapter 7: The erotics of televisionConclusion: Sites of wonder, sights of wonder

O autorze

Helen Wheatley is Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the editor of Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography (I.B.Tauris, 2007), co-editor of Television for Women: New Directions (2016) and author of Gothic Television (2006). Her research focuses on television history and aesthetics.