The bibliography lists works cited in the text and is also designed to point to useful further reading. The annotated list of ‘essential reading’ highlights works considered to be of particular importance to contemporary understandings of film genre, although many valuable contributions are also to be found under ‘secondary reading’ and in volumes on individual genres.
ESSENTIAL READING
Altman, Rick (1999) Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute.
Accessible and wide-ranging discussion on genre theory, criticism and development.
Barthes, Roland (1972) Mythologies. Ed. and trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang.
Pioneering semiological analyses of ideology within the artifacts of popular culture.
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson (1985) The Classic Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press.
Exhaustive study that analyses the style of typical Hollywood movies and the function of the studio system.
Cawelti, John (1985) The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press.
Major study of the western genre and popular art across several forms and media of popular culture, including cinema.
Frye, Northrop (1970) Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. New York: Atheneum. Foundational genre study of formulas and modes in literature.
Grant, Barry Keith (ed.) (2003) Film Genre Reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Central collection of important essays on genre theory and individual genres.
Neale, Steve (1980) Genre. London: British Film Institute.
Brief but important early work of film genre theory.
______ (2000) Genre and Hollywood. New York and London: Routledge. Ambitious examination of the studio system and a number of genres including the critical debates they have engendered.
Schatz, Thomas (1981) Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System. New York: Random House.
Important study of the Hollywood genre system and six major genres.
Wollen, Peter (1972) Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, revised edn. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press.
Influential work of film theory with relevant chapters on the auteur theory and semiology of the cinema.
SECONDARY READING
Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer (1997) ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York and London: Verso, 120–67.
Alloway, Lawrence (1971) Violent America: The Movies 1946–1964. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
Altman, Rick (ed.) (1980) Genre: The Musical. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
______ (1987) The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
Aquila, Richard (ed.) (1996) Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Aristotle (1982) Poetics. Trans. James Hutton. New York: Norton.
Arnold, Matthew (1960 [1882]) Culture and Anarchy. London and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bazin, André (1968) ‘La Politique des Auteurs’, in Peter Graham (ed.) The New Wave. New York: Doubleday/London: British Film Institute, 137–55.
______ (1971a) ‘The Evolution of the Western’, in What is Cinema?, vol. II. Ed. and trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 149–57.
______ (1971b) ‘The Western, or the American Film par excellence’, in What is Cinema?, vol. II. Ed. and trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 140–8.
Bogle, Donald (1973) Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks. New York: Viking.
Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton (2002) A Panorama of American Film Noir. Trans. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights.
Bordwell, David (1979) ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Film Criticism 4, 1, 56–64.
Bourget, Jean-Loup (2003 [1973]) ‘Social Implications in the Hollywood Genres’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Film Genre Reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press, 51–9.
Braudy, Leo (1977) The World in a Frame: What We See in Films. Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday.
Brooks, Van Wyck (1970 [1915]) Three Essays on America. New York: Dutton.
Browne, Nick (ed.) (1988) Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Buscombe, Ed (ed.) (1990) The BFI Companion to the Western. New York: Atheneum.
______ (2003 [1970]) ‘The Idea of Genre in American Cinema’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Film Genre Reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press, 12–26.
Caughie, John (ed.) (1981) Theories of Authorship. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Cavell, Stanley (1981) Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Cawelti, John (1976) Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
______ (1985) The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press.
______ (2003 [1979]) ‘Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Film Genre Reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press, 243–61.
Chabrol, Claude (1968) ‘Little Themes’, in Peter Graham (ed.) The New Wave. New York: Doubleday/London: British Film Institute, 73–7.
Clover, Carol J. (1992) Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cohan, Steven and Ina Rae Hark (eds) (1993) Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. London and New York: Routledge.
Collins, Jim (1992) ‘Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity’, in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins (eds) Film Theory Goes to the Movies. New York and London: Routledge, 242–63.
Collins, Richard (1970) ‘Genre: A Reply to Ed Buscombe’, Screen, 11, 4–5 (August–September), 66–75.
Comolli, Jean and Jean Narboni (1977 [1969] ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism (1), Screen Reader, London: SEFT, 2–11.
Cook, Pam (1976) ‘Exploitation Films and Feminism’, Screen, 17, 2 (Summer), 122–7.
Cook, Pam and Mieke Bernink (eds) (1999) The Cinema Book, 2nd edn. London: British Film Institute.
Creed, Barbara (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Damico, James (1978) ‘Film Noir: A Modest Proposal’, Film Reader 3, 48–57.
Desser, David (2003) ‘Global Noir: Genre Film in the Age of Transnationalism’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Film Genre Reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press, 516–36.
Dixon, Wheeler Winston (ed.) (2000) Film Genre 2000. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Doane, Mary Ann (1987) The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Doherty, Thomas (1988) Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Douglas, Drake (1969) Horror! New York: Macmillan.
Durgnat, Raymond (1967) Films and Feelings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Eisenstein, Sergei (1949 [1936]) ‘Through Theatre to Cinema’, in Jay Leyda (ed.) Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 3–17.
Elsaesser, Thomas (2003 [1973]) ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’: Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press, 363–95.
Feuer, Jane (1982) The Hollywood Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Focillon, Henri (1942) Life of Forms in Art. New York: George Wittenborn.
Forster, E. M. (1927) Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Frayling, Christopher (1981) Spaghetti Westerns. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Gallagher, Tag (2003 [1986]) ‘Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral: Problems in the “Evolution” of the Western’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Film Genre Reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press, 262–76.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr (1988) The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gehring, Wes D. (ed.) (1988) Handbook of American Film Genres. New York: Greenwood Press.
Gledhill, Christine (ed.) (1987) Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. London: British Film Institute.
Graham, Peter (ed.) (1968) The New Wave. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Grant, Barry Keith (1986) ‘The Classic Hollywood Musical and the “Problem” of Rock ’n’ Roll’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 13, 4 (Winter), 195–205.
______ (ed.) (1996) The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
______ (ed.) (2003) John Ford’s Stagecoach. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
______ (2004) ‘Man’s Favourite Sport?: The Action Films of Kathryn Bigelow’, in Yvonne Tasker (ed.) Action and Adventure Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 371–84.
Grant, Barry Keith and Christopher Sharrett (eds) (2004) Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, 2nd edn. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Guerrero, Ed (1993) Framing Blackness: The African-American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Halliday, Jon (1971) Sirk on Sirk. London: Secker & Warburg/British Film Institute.
Harris, Kenneth Marc (1990) ‘American Film Genres and Non-American Films: A Case Study of Utu’, Cinema Journal, 29, 2 (Winter), 36–59.
Haskell, Molly (1974) From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Baltimore: Penguin.
Hutchings, Peter (1995) ‘Genre Theory and Criticism’, in Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich (eds) Approaches to Popular Film. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 59–77.
Jeffords, Susan (1994) Hardbodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Jenkins, Henry (1993) What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press.
Jermyn, Deborah and Sean Redmond (eds) (2003) The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor. London: Wallflower Press.
Kaminsky, Stuart M. (1974) American Film Genres: Approaches to a Critical Theory of Popular Film. Dayton, OH: Pflaum.
Kaplan, E. Ann (ed.) (1980) Women in Film Noir, revised edn. London: British Film Institute.
Kawin, Bruce (1987) How Movies Work. New York: Macmillan/London: Collier-Macmillan.
Keane, Stephen (2006) Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe, second edition. London: Wallflower Press.
King, Geoff (2002) Film Comedy. London: Wallflower Press.
King, Geoff and Tanya Krzywinska (2000) Science Fiction Cinema: From Outerspace to Cyberspace. London and New York: Wallflower Press.
Kitses, Jim (1970) Horizons West. Bloomington: Indiana University Press/London: British Film Institute.
Klinger, Barbara (2003 [1986]) ‘“Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” Revisited: The Progressive Genre’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Film Genre Reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press, 75–91.
Knight, Arthur (2002) Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Krutnik, Frank (1991) In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, and Masculinity. London and New York: Routledge.
Landy, Marcia (ed.) (1991) Imitations of Life. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Leab, Daniel J. (1976) From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Leitch, Thomas (2002) Crime Films. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1977) Structural Anthropology. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.
MacDonald, Dwight (1964 [1953]) ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’, in Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (eds) Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America. New York: Free Press/London: Collier-Macmillan, 59–73
Mast, Gerald (ed.) (1982) The Movies in Our Midst. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
______ (1987) Can’t Help Singin’: The American Musical on Stage and Screen. New York: Overlook Press.
McArthur, Colin (1972) Underworld USA. New York: Viking Press/London: British Film Institute.
McCarthy, Charles and Todd Flynn (eds) (1975) Kings of the Bs: Working within the Hollywood System. New York: Dutton.
McDonald, Paul (2000) The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities. London: Wallflower Press.
McHugh, Kathleen and Nancy Abelman (2005) South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Mercer, John and Martin Shingler (2004) Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility. London: Wallflower Press.
Miller, Toby, Nitin Givil, John McMurria and Richard Maxwell (2001) Global Hollywood. London: British Film Institute.
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (1982) ‘The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930’, in Gerald Mast (ed.) The Movies in Our Midst. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 321–32.
Mulvey, Laura (1989) Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Naremore, James (1998) More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Neale, Steve (1993 [1983]) ‘Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema’ in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds) Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 9–20.
______ (ed.) (2002) Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. London: British Film Institute.
______ (2003 [1990]) ‘Questions of Genre’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Film Genre Reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press, 164–97.
Neale, Steve and Murray Smith (eds) (1998) Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. London and New York: Routledge.
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (1968) Visconti. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
O’Regan, Tom (1996) Australian National Cinema. London and New York: Routledge.
Powdermarket, Hortense (1950) Hollywood: The Dream Factory. Boston: Little, Brown.
Propp, Vladimir (1968 [1927]) Morphology of the Folk Tale. Trans. Laurence Scott. Austin and London: University of Texas Press.
Pye, Douglas (2003 [1975]) ‘The Western (Genre and Movies)’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Film Genre Reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press, 203–18.
Ray, Robert B. (1989) A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Redmond, Sean (ed.) (2004) Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader. London: Wallflower Press.
Rubin, Martin (1999) Thrillers. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ryall, Tom (1970) ‘The Notion of Genre’, Screen, 11, 2 (March–April), 22–32.
______ (1998a) ‘British Cinema and Genre’, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 1, 18–24.
______ (1998b) ‘Genre and Hollywood’, in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds) The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 327–37.
Ryan, Michael and Douglas Kellner (1988) Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Sargeant, Jack and Stephanie Watson (eds) (1999) Lost Highways: An Illustrated History of Road Movies. London: Creation Books.
Sarris, Andrew (1973) ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962’, in The Primal Screen. New York: Simon and Schuster, 38–53.
______ (1976) The John Ford Movie Mystery. London: Secker & Warburg/British Film Institute.
______ (1985) The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Saunders, John (2001) The Western Genre: From Lordsburg to Big Whiskey. London: Wallflower Press.
Schaefer, Eric (1999) ‘Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!’: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Schrader, Paul (2003 [1972]) ‘Notes on Film Noir’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Film Genre Reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press, 229–42.
Shadoian, Jack (1977) Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/Crime Film. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam (1996) ‘From the Imperial Family to the Transnational Imaginary: Media Spectatorship in the Age of Globalization’, in Robin Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (eds) Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 47–92.
Silver, Alain and James Ursini (1996) (eds) Film Noir Reader. New York: Limelight.
Slotkin, Richard (1992) Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum.
Sobchack, Thomas (2003 [1975]) ‘Genre Film: A Classical Experience’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Film Genre Reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press, 103–14.
Sobchack, Vivian (1980) The Limits of Infinity: The American Science Fiction Film. New York: A. S. Barnes.
Sontag, Susan (1966) Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Delta.
Staiger, Janet (2003 [1997]) ‘Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre History’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Film Genre Reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press, 185–99.
Tasker, Yvonne (1993) Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. London and New York: Routledge.
______ (ed.) (2004) Action and Adventure Cinema. New York and London: Routledge.
Telotte, J. P. (ed.) (1991) The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason. Austin: University of Texas Press.
______ (2001) Science Fiction Film. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tudor, Andrew (1973) Theories of Film. New York: Viking Press/London: British Film Institute.
Turner, Graeme (1993) ‘The Genres are American: Australian Narrative, Australian Film, and the Problems of Genre’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 21, 2, 102–11.
Waller, Gregory (1986) The Living and the Undead: From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Warshow, Robert (1971a) ‘The Gangster as Tragic Hero’, in The Immediate Experience. New York: Atheneum, 127–34.
______ (1971b) ‘Movie Chronicle: The Westerner’, in The Immediate Experience. New York: Atheneum, 135–54.
Wells, Paul (2000) The Horror Genre: From Beezlebub to Blair Witch. London: Wallflower Press.
Williams, Alan (1984) ‘Is a Radical Genre Criticism Possible?’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 9, 2 (Spring), 121–5.
Williams, Linda (2003 [1991]) ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess’ in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Film Genre Reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press, 141–159.
Wood, Robin (1968) Howard Hawks. London: Secker & Warburg/British Film Institute.
______ (1979a) ‘The American Family Comedy: From Meet Me in St. Louis to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, Wide Angle, 3, 2, 5–11.
______ (1979b) ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’, in Richarrd Lippe and Robin Wood (eds) American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 7–28.
______ (1986) Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press.
______ (1989) Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press.
______ (1996 [1983]) ‘Burying the Undead: The Use and Obsolescence of Count Dracula’ in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 364–78.
______ (2003 [1977]) ‘Ideology, Genre, Auteur’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Film Genre Reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press, 60–74.
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Wright, Will (1976) Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. Berkeley: University of California Press.