Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK

This is a study of audiences for historical representation in film. The period drama is a British phenomenon but this is the first empirically-based study of the genre’s audience. By exploring the attitudes and habits of this audience, it breaks new ground both in scholarship of contemporary period films and in film-audience studies. The book contrasts two opposite sections of late-1990s UK audiences, which has illuminating and unpredicted results. It includes an extensive discussion of Merchant Ivory productions and Jane Austen adaptations. It includes 11 tables that illustrate the findings of the Heritage Audience Survey. There are 3 appendices contain details of the questionnaire and the demographics of respondents.

Reviews of Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK

In what is usually called 'the heritage debate' – and which has involved many of us within film and cultural studies over a long period of time – we have all made endless suppositions about the audiences who watch the films about which we wrangle. A book which actually conducts a proper analysis of these audiences is long overdue. It is doubly pleasing that when this book appears, it should be written by one of the leading proponents within that debate, and written with all Claire Monk's rigorous scholarship, in her inimitable and elegant style.–Pamela Church Gibson, Reader in Cultural and Historical Studies, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London