Cinema, Culture, Scotland

Colin McArthur is former Head of the Distribution Division at the British Film Institute and former Visiting Professor at Glasgow Caledonian University and Queen Margaret University. He has written extensively on Hollywood cinema, British television and Scottish culture. His most recent book is Along the Great Divide (2020).

This Reader presents 36 essays written by the eminent Film and Scottish Studies scholar, Colin McArthur between 1966 and the present. Including 20 works now out of print, it identifies the central strands of scholarly interest and political engagement that have driven and defined the career of one of British film and Scottish cultural studies' founding figures and most influential voices. Presented chronologically, the essays make McArthur's achievements - his leading role in legitimising the study of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood cinema and popular American film genres; his leadership in establishing Scotland's cinematic representation as an important object of study within British film studies and modern Scottish cultural studies; and his imaginative interrogation of Scotland's distinctive role as a visual and material cultural signifier within a diverse range of post-18th-century international popular cultures - available to new generations of scholars. The volume also helps its reader to understand the historical emergence and evolution of Anglophone film studies and Scottish cultural studies during the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Colin McArthur is former Head of the Distribution Division at the British Film Institute and former Visiting Professor at Glasgow Caledonian University and Queen Margaret University. He has written extensively on Hollywood cinema, British television and Scottish culture. His most recent book is Along the Great Divide (2020). Jonathan Murray is Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The New Scottish Cinema (2015) and Discomfort and Joy (2011), a Contributing Writer for Cineaste magazine and co-Principal Editor of Journal of British Cinema and Television.