A broad survey on how audiences make meaning out of mass media Media Reception Studies broadly surveys the past century of scholarship on the ways in which audiences make meaning out of mass media. It synthesizes in plain language social scientific, linguistic, and cultural studies approaches to film and television as communication media. Janet Staiger traverses a broad terrain, covering the Chicago School, early psychological approaches, Soviet theory, the Frankfurt School, mass communication research and critical theory, linguistics and semiotic theory, social-psychoanalytical research, cognitive psychology, and cultural studies. She offers these theories as a set of tools for understanding the complex relationships between films and their audiences, TV shows and their viewers. She explains such questions as the behavior of fans; the implications of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity with regard to the media; the effect of violence, horror, and sexually explicit images on viewers; and the place of memory in spectatorship. Providing an organized and lucid introduction to a staggering amount of work, Media Reception Studies is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in understanding the effects of mass media.

The texts, images and events of the ancient world have been used both as sources of authority and exploitation in politics, culture and society and as icons of resistance and contest. How classical culture is transplanted into new contexts, how texts are translated and performed and how Greek and Roman values are perceived and used continues to be a force in current debates. The main concepts and explanatory frameworks used in the field are introduced through chapters on reception within antiquity and case studies of more recent receptions from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and the USA. The book will be of use to all those interested in the relationship between the arts, culture and society as well as to students and teachers of classical subjects and of literature, drama, film and comparative cultural studies.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Reception introduces students and academics alike to the study of the way in which texts are received by readers, viewers, and audiences. Organized conceptually and thematically, this book provides a much-needed overview of the field, drawing on work in literary and cultural studies as well as Classics, Biblical studies, medievalism, and the media history of the book. It provides new ways of understanding and configuring the relationships between the various terminologies and theories that comprise reception study, and suggests potential ways forward for study and research in the light of such new configurations. Written in a clear and accessible style, this is the ideal introduction to the study of reception.

Many study the reception of Classical Antiquity today. But why, how and from what conceptual or disciplinary frame? A number of selected representative chapters on these questions illustrate the remarkable diversity and vitality of Classical Receptions Studies and set the agenda for future research.

Offering compelling insights into the Italian adaptation of diversified English products, this volume is addressed to both scholars and students wishing to delve into the field of reception studies. It focuses on literary, multimedia and audiovisual translation due to the conviction that the modalities through which the imprinting of “Italianness” is marked upon several English hypertexts are still worth investigating today. The contributions here highlight how some choices may, in some instances, alter the meaning as much as the success of some English aesthetic texts, by directing, if not possibly undermining, the audience reception.

Dynamic Reading examines the reception history of Epicureanism in the West, focusing in particular on the ways in which it has provided conceptual tools for defining how we read and respond to texts, art, and the world more generally.