Archive for publications, June 2016

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[ecrea] Book Announcement: Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure (I.B. Tauris, 2016) by Helen Wheatley

Thu Jun 30 10:11:56 GMT 2016




Book Announcement
Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure (I.B. Tauris, 2016) by Helen Wheatley

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 colour 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 and 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?

Contents:
Introduction: What is spectacular television? What is (tele)visual pleasure?

Part I Spectacular Histories, Spectacular Technologies

Chapter 1: Television comes to town: The spectacle of television at the mid-twentieth-century exhibition and beyond Chapter 2: Spectacular colour? Reconsidering the launch of colour television in Britain

Part II Spectacular Landscapes and the Natural World: Exploring beautiful television

Chapter 3: At home on safari: Colonial spectacle, domestic space and 1950s television Chapter 4: Visual pleasure, natural history television, and televisual beauty Chapter 5: Television's landscapes, (tele)visual pleasure and the imagined elsewhere

Part III Spectacular Bodies and (Tele)visual Pleasure
Chapter 6: Fascinating bodies: Looking inside television's somatic spectacle
Chapter 7: The erotics of television

Conclusion: Sites of wonder, sights of wonder

Endorsements:

‘This superb book is no small accomplishment. Spectacular Television provides a painstaking archaeology of televisual excess as both a formal and industrial practice and places television in dialogue with an array of illuminating approaches. In doing so, Wheatley develops a precedent-setting research model and absolute must-read for television studies students and scholars everywhere.’
Professor John T. Caldwell, UCLA, USA

‘At last a book that really understands the “vision” part of television, and television studies. Helen Wheatley here rediscovers responses to the wide range of visual delights – and shocks! – that the medium has offered since its inception, highlighting television’s “spectacularity” through careful analyses.’
Professor John Ellis, Royal Holloway, University of London
‘Helen Wheatley’s innovative Spectacular Television exposes our contemporary oversight of the significance of television’s visual strategies. Through a series of compelling case studies, and a fascinating history of television as technology, she demonstrates how television – the apparent ‘poor relation’ of cinema in terms of spectacle – always enticed and continues to entrance audiences with images that variously provoke curiosity, wonder and disgust.’
Professor Karen Lury, University of Glasgow

Buy it at
Hive: http://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Helen-Wheatley/Spectacular-Television--Exploring-Televisual-Pleasure/16253609 (it’s cheaper here at the moment and you don’t have to give your money to Amazon!)

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spectacular-Television-Exploring-Televisual-International/dp/1780767374/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1467203845&sr=8-1&keywords=spectacular+television

Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/Spectacular-Television-Exploring-Televisual-International/dp/1780767374/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1467203897&sr=8-1&keywords=spectacular+television

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