Screball Television: Critical Perspectives on Gilmore Girls [Hardcover]

Bringing together seventeen original essays by scholars from around the world, Screwball Television offers a variety of international perspectives on Gilmore Girls (WB/CW, 2000 2007). Adored by fans and celebrated by critics for its sophisticated wordplay and compelling portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship, this contemporary American TV program finally gets its due as a cultural production unlike any other one that is beholden to Hollywood s screwball comedies of the 1930s, steeped in intertextual references, and framed as a kinder, gentler kind of cult television series in this tightly focused yet wide-ranging collection.

This volume makes a significant contribution to television studies, genre studies, and women s studies, taking Gilmore Girls as its focus while adopting a panoramic critical approach sensitive to such topics as

- serialized fiction
- elite education
- addiction as a social construct
- food consumption and the disciplining of bodies
- post-feminism and female desire
depictions of journalism in popular culture
- the changing face of masculinity in contemporary U.S. society
- liturgical and ritualistic structures in televisual narrative
- Orientalism and Asian representations on American TV
- Internet fan discourses
- new genre theories attuned to the landscape of twenty-first-century media convergence

Screwball Television seeks to bring Gilmore Girls more fully into academic discourse not only as a topic worthy of critical scrutiny but also as an infinitely rewarding text capable of stimulating the imagination of students beyond the classroom.