Kategoria BISAC: Performing Arts >> Television - General

Prime time soaps are often revered long after their runs on television have ended, as Dallas, Twin Peaks, and Beverly Hills 90210 readily demonstrate. Due to their profound impact, it's easy to forget how recently the genre itself was born. Dallas premiered in 1978, and was originally intended to air solely as a five-part mini-series. Then, in 1981, producer Aaron Spelling stepped in and introduced his own ultra-glitzy entry Dynasty. Between these two mega-hits, the era of the nighttime soap was born. Soaps soon spun off into non-traditional avenues as...

• Explores a diverse range of topics and theories that have led to television's current incarnation, and predict its likely future
• Covers technology and aesthetics, television's relationship to the state, televisual commerce; texts, representation, genre, internationalism, and audience reception and effects
• Essays are by an international group of first-rate scholars

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For over half a century, television has been the most central medium in Western democracies - the political, social and cultural centrepiece of the public sphere. Television has therefore rarely been studied in isolation from its socio-cultural and political context; there is always something important at stake when the forms and functions of television are on the agenda. The digitisation of television concerns the production, contents, distribution and reception of the medium, but also its position in the overall, largely digitised media system and public sphere where the internet plays a...

"To be continued... " Whether these words fall at a season-ending episode of Star Trek or a TV commercial flirtation between coffee-loving neighbors, true fans find them impossible to resist. Ever since the 1830s, when Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers enticed a mass market for fiction, the serial has been a popular means of snaring avid audiences. Jennifer Hayward establishes serial fiction as a distinct genre -- one defined by the activities of its audience rather than by the formal qualities of the text. Ranging from installment novels, mysteries, and detective fiction of...