Doing History in the Age of Downton Abbey Journal of British Cinema and Television, Volume 16, Issue 1

by Geraghty, Christine; Taddeo, Julie Anne

• ISBN13: 9781474450799
• ISBN10: 1474450792
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2019-02-01
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Author Biography

Christine Geraghty is Honorary Professorial Fellow, University of Glasgow. She has published on British Cinema of the 1950/60s, on television fiction particularly soap operas, and on classic adaptations.

Julie Anne Taddeo teaches British history at University of Maryland, College Park, USA. She is the author of Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity (Haworth, 2002); She has edited and co-edited the following collections: Upstairs and Downstairs: British Costume Drama Television from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey (with James Leggott; Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology (with Cynthia J. Miller, Scarecrow, 2012); Catherine Cookson Country: On the Borders of Legitimacy, Fiction and History (Ashgate 2012); The Tube Has Spoken: Reality TV & History (with Ken Dvorak, University Press of Kentucky, 2009). She is an Associate Editor for The Journal of Popular Television (published by Intellect) and is Secretary of the Middle Atlantic Conference on British Studies (MACBS).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction, Julie Anne Taddeo
2. Nicoletta F. Gullace, "A (very) open élite: Downton Abbey, historical fiction, and America's romance with the British aristocracy"
3. Charles Upchurch, "Undoing difference: academic historians and the Downton Abbey audience"
4. Julie Anne Taddeo, "Let's talk about sex: period drama histories for the twenty-first century"
5. Dina Copelman, "Consuming British nostalgia in Downton Abbey"
6. Jessica Meyer, "Matthew's legs and Thomas's hand: watching Downton Abbey as a First World War historian"
7. Hannah Greig, "'The new Downton Abbey'?: Poldark and the presentation and perception of an eighteenth-century past"