Film, Cinema, Genre
The Steve Neale Reader
by Steve Neale, Frank Krutnik and Richard Maltby
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Book Presentation:
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: https://doi.org/10.47788/YRCC6901
This Reader brings together for the first time key works by Steve Neale, one of the founding figures of UK film studies. It includes selections of his influential writing on genre, together with other critical work encompassing film analysis, representation, cinema history, technology, and the film industry.
About the authors:
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.
Press Reviews:
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
See the publisher website: University of Exeter Press
> From the same authors:
Thrillers, Chillers, and Killers (2025)
Radio and Film Noir
The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History (2020)
Dir. Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers
Subject: History of Cinema
Silent Features (2018)
The Development of Silent Feature Films 1914 - 1934
Dir. Steve Neale
Subject: Silent Cinema
Popular Film and Television Comedy (2016)
by Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik
Subject: Genre > Comedy/Humor
Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters (2010)
A Hollywood History
by Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale
Subject: Countries > United States
'Un-American' Hollywood (2007)
Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era
by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve and Peter Stanfield
Subject: History of Cinema
'Film Europe' and 'Film America' (1999)
Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920-1939
Dir. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby
Subject: History of Cinema
> On a related topic:
Street with No Name (2021)
A History of the Classic American Film Noir
Hollywood's Melodramatic Imagination (2021)
Film Noir, the Western and Other Genres from the 1920s to the 1950s
by Geoff Mayer
Subject: Genre > All Genres
Encyclopedia of Film Themes, Settings and Series (2009)
by Richard B. Armstrong and Mary Willems Armstrong
Subject: Genre > All Genres
The Shifting Definitions of Genre (2008)
Essays on Labeling Films, Television Shows and Media
Dir. Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich
Subject: Genre > All Genres