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.
