Television/Death

by Helen Wheatley

Overview

Edinburgh Studies in Television offers fresh and original scholarship in television studies, providing excellent models of textual analysis whilst paying particular attention to social issues and/or theoretical debates.

Books in the series pay attention to still neglected analysis of the formal aspects of television (e.g. television performance) and/or draw on recent interest on the experience of audio-visual media (e.g. affect and intimacy).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474451734
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2025
Series:	Edinburgh Studies in Television
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Helen Wheatley is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. She is co-founder of the Centre for Television Histories and works collaboratively with archives and curators to engage the public with the history of British broadcasting. Her most recent book, Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure (2016) won the BAFTSS Award for Monograph of the Year in 2017. She has research interests in various aspects of television history and has published widely on popular genres of television drama, including the monograph Gothic Television (2006). She also has an ongoing interest in issues of television history and historiography, the topic of her edited collections Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography (2007) and Television for Women: New Directions (2016, with Rachel Moseley and Helen Wood).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Television/Death

Section One: Death and Dying on Television

Chapter One: Everyday death: The early history of death on British television

Chapter Two: Signs of care: Assisted suicide on television

Section Two: Dramas of Grief, Bereavement and the Television Afterlife

Chapter Three: A good death? Death and the afterlife in US television fiction

Chapter Four: Dramas of grief: television and mourning

Chapter Five: Haunted houses, haunted landscapes: grief and trauma in the television ghost story

Section Three: Posthumous Television

Chapter Six: Entering the mausoleum: Posthumous television

Chapter Seven: Ghost town: Posthumous television in the city

Notes

References

Index

Editorial Reviews

"In Television/Death, Helen Wheatley pursues the topic of television and death in many different and unexpected ways. In the process she sheds light on issues and ideas that are at once illuminating and compelling. This includes the ways in which television’s representations of death, and the television archive, serve as a source of memory, grief, and even trauma. She handles these issues with distinctive sensitivity and insight. This is a wholly original study from a scholar whose critical eye and theoretical mind consistently open the field to new ideas, and this book is no exception."

Professor Mimi White

Television, Helen Wheatley argues cogently and persuasively, is much possessed of death. Her book is a dazzlingly wide-ranging study of the dying, the dead and the afterlife in documentaries and dramas. Exploring questions of television and intimacy, ethics, community and, crucially, the archive, this is a rich, engaging, essential volume.

Professor John Wyver