A rich account that combines media-industry history and cultural studies, Their Own Best Creations looks at women writers' contributions to some of the most popular genres of postwar TV: comedy-variety, family sitcom, daytime soap, and suspense anthology. During the 1950s, when the commercial medium of television was still being defined, women writers navigated pressures at work, constructed public personas that reconciled traditional and progressive femininity, and asserted that a woman's point of view was essential to television as an art form. The shows they authored allegorize these professional and personal pressures and articulate a nascent second-wave feminist consciousness. Annie Berke brings to light the long-forgotten and under-studied stories of these women writers and crucially places them in the historical and contemporary record.
Annie Berke is the film editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her scholarship and criticism have been published in Camera Obscura, Public Books, Feminist Media Histories, Ms, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. She was formerly Assistant Professor of Film at Hollins University.
Title: Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television: 1 (Feminist Media Histories)
Author: Berke, Annie
ISBN: 9780520300798
Binding:
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication Date: 2022-03-29
Number of Pages: 302
Weight: 0.4081 kg
Berke's imagination - bolstered by insight, expertise, and scholarship - reveals stunning depths. Authors' intent may be unknowable, but critical interpretations are their own kind of creative work. Berke's interpretations are generative and convincing accounts of the way that art and artists can come to reflect each other.
* Los Angeles Review of Books *