Dramatising Disaster Character, Event, Representation

The imagining of disaster has intensified across a wide range of media entertainment formats and genres in recent years and themes of disaster are regularly deployed in fictional films, television drama series, drama-documentaries, comic books and video games. This being the case, it is therefore vital that film and media scholars pay attention to the ways in which disaster is presented to us, to the figurative strategies employed, to the representational history of disaster in media, to the metaphorical resonances of disaster themes, and even to the ways in which entertainment media texts might be understood as part of a broader discourse of disaster within certain historical and cultural contexts. Dramatising Disaster presents new and innovative research from both early career and more established academics. Some of the chapters in this edited collection are based upon papers originally presented at a highly successful conference study day held by the School of Film, Television and Media at the University of East Anglia in 2011, while others are specifically solicited contributions. Distinct from previous, more particularised film and media studies in this area, this edited collection is focused not upon a specific disaster or specific disaster context, but upon the wider topic of disaster in popular culture.