British Cinema

Serious scholarly writing and research on British cinema has burgeoned to a dizzying degree in recent decades, and this new four-volume collection from Routledge meets the need for an authoritative reference work to enable users to navigate and make sense of the subject’s large body of scholarship, and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by Robert Murphy, the leading expert in the field, this new title is a ‘mini library’ of the foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship on British cinema.

British Cinema provides an indispensable one-stop resource on the major periods, genres, studios, filmmakers, and debates in British cinema from the nineteenth century to the present day. The collection addresses a wide range of issues and topics including: British cinema as a ‘national’ cinema; its often difficult relationship with Hollywood; censorship; gender representation; distinctively British genres (not least, horror, comedy, and costume film); and the output of studios and directors (including immortals such as Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, Alexander Mackendrick, and Michael Powell).

British Cinema includes a full index and a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and advanced students of film studies as a vital research tool.

Robert Murphy is Emeritus Professor in Film Studies at De Montfort University. He has contributed essays to a variety of collections, written several entries for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and published articles in Screen, The Journal of British Cinema and Television, Sight and Sound, Senses of Cinema, Film International and The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. His books include Realism and Tinsel (Routledge, 1989), Sixties British Cinema (BFI, 1992), Smash and Grab: Gangsters in the London Underworld 1920–60 (Faber and Faber, 1993), British Cinema and the Second World War (Continuum, 2000), and as editor British Crime Cinema (with Steve Chibnall, Routledge, 1999), British Cinema of the 90s (BFI, 2000), Directors in British and Irish Cinema (BFI, 2006), The British Cinema Book (3rd edition, BFI, 2009). He is currently writing about British Film Noir.

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