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

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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