Hopeful Vision: Entertainment on the Small Screen

This monograph recuperates the concept of entertainment as a legitimate basis for ‘small screen’ criticism. It suggests that critical approaches to television might treat the text as an object of potential which actively engages and provides for aesthetic experience through entertainment.

Aesthetic experience is characterised by emotion, and this study shows how the textual production of specifically forward feelings such as anticipation, aspiration, fear or dread may be mobilised and made ...