Film, Cinema, Genre

This book brings together key works by pioneering film studies scholar Steve Neale. From the 1970s to the 2010s Neale’s vital and unparalleled contribution to the subject has shaped many of the critical agendas that helped to confirm film studies’ position as an innovative discipline within the humanities.

Although known primarily for his work on genre, Neale has written on a far wider range of topics. In addition to selections from the influential volumes Genre (1980) and Genre and Hollywood (2000), and articles scrutinizing individual genres – the melodrama, the war film, science fiction and film noir –   this Reader provides critical examinations of cinema and technology, art cinema, gender and cinema, stereotypes and representation, cinema history, the film industry, New Hollywood, and film analysis. Many of the articles included are recommended reading for a range of university courses worldwide, making the volume useful to students at undergraduate level and above, researchers, and teachers of film studies, media studies, gender studies and cultural studies.

The collection has been selected and edited by Frank Krutnik and Richard Maltby, scholars who have worked closely with Neale and been inspired by his diverse and often provocative critical innovations. Their introduction assesses the significance of Neale’s work, and contextualizes it within the development of UK film studies.

DOI: 47788/YRCC6901

"The book charts Neale's intellectual development over the course of his career, as he subjected his own earlier assumptions to critique and revision, serving as an original account of disciplinary change over time through the prism of one of its key actors." Sheldon Hall, Sheffield Hallam University "The book serves as a handbook of methods of analysis - archival work involving print culture, "distant" readings of large bodies of film, close textual analysis, theoretical polemics. Neale's work provides some of the best examples of each of these methods: a "manual" of sorts in film studies." Will Straw, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

The late Steve Neale was Emeritus Professor of Film Studies at the University of Exeter, and a Series Editor of Exeter Studies in Film History. He was the author of Genre and Hollywood (2000), co-author of Epics, Spectacles and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (2010), editor of The Classical Hollywood Reader (2012), co-editor of ‘Un-American’ Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (2007) and Widescreen Worldwide (2010), and a contributor to Film Moments: Criticism, Theory, History (2010) and to Film Studies and Movie.

He was recipient of BAFTSS’s Outstanding Achievement Award in 2017.

Frank Krutnik is a Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (1991), Popular Film and Television Comedy (with Steve Neale, 1990) and Inventing Jerry Lewis (2000), and editor of Hollywood Comedians: the Film Reader (2003), Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (with Steve Neale, Brian Neve, Peter Stanfield, 2003) as well as special issues of New Review of Film and Television Studies and Film Studies.

Richard Maltby is the Matthew Flinders Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Screen Studies at Flinders University, Adelaide. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he has published extensively on the cultural history of Hollywood and edited eight books on the history of cinema audiences, exhibition and reception, including Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema (UEP, 2007; co-edited with Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen). He is a Series Editor for Exeter Studies in Film History.

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