Screen Histories: A `Screen' Reader offers a selection of some of the best work on the varied and changing notions of the category `history' in screen studies published in Screen in the last twenty years. The book brings together important work in this area at a time when `history' is an increasingly contested category within academic debate. It includes interventions on the conceptualization of history in studies of screen institutions, technologies, discourses, texts, and audiences. In addition, the varied meanings of the concept of history for film and television studies in both Britain and the USA are represented and fully explored.
L The book includes contributions by established scholars in the field and work by new researchers whose work bids fair to shift the entire agenda of screen historiography. It challenges the boundaries conventionally raised between history and other areas of screen study (such as textual analysis and audience ethnography), and indeed between history and theory, and many of the contributions confirm the key role being played by theoretically sophisticated historical work in the development of film and television studies as a whole.