Introduction

In the brief histories of the new disciplines of film, television and cultural studies the later 1980s marked a period of intellectual settling down and institutional consolidation. Degrees and courses in television, media and cultural studies had proved attractive to students, and this gave an unfamiliar institutional (semi)security to teachers in these areas while expanding enrolment continued. While this had specific material consequences in terms of the massive expansion of books published in this field-a comparison of the Routledge catalogues from 1986 through to the present would be particularly revealing-this expansion both marked and concealed a change of intellectual tone. As the study of television within the academy became more acceptable, less energy and argument had to be expended on legitimating this study. Instead of arguments about whether and why classroom time might be devoted to television-as in Chapter 1 of this book —the demand is for textbooks, standard accounts and introductions to the study of television. The inaugural books of television studies published in the 1970s

concentrate on establishing television as a specific object of study which exceeds the paradigms of, on the one hand, political economy or sociology of mass communication and, on the other, literary or dramatic criticism. While drawing on work from these different disciplines, television studies in particular will address the particularity of the television text, its representations and address. Here we can place Williams’s Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), Newcomb’s TV: The Most Popular Art (1974) and Stuart Hall’s early writing on television (Hall 1973, 1998). The first tranche of work includes Fiske and Hartley’s Reading Television (1978), the BFI Television Monographs (197382), Len Masterman’s Teaching About Television (1980), Stuart Hood’s On Television (1980), the Open University/BFI collection Popular Television and Film (Bennett et al. 1981) and, perhaps concluding this period, John Ellis’s Visible Fictions (1982) and Ann Kaplan’s Regarding Television, the 1983 book from her 1981 conference.