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Television before TV rethinks the history of interwar television by exploring the medium's numerous demonstrations organized at national fairs and international exhibitions in the late 1920s and 1930s. Building upon extensive archival research in Britain, Germany, and the United States, Anne-Katrin Weber analyses the sites where the new medium met its first audiences. She argues that public displays offered spaces where television's symbolic, cultural, political, and social definitions were negotiated and eventually stabilized; for the historian, the exhibitions therefore constitute crucial events to understand not only the medium's pre-war emergence, but also its subsequent domestication in the post-war years. Designed as a transnational study, her book highlights the multiple circulations of artefacts and ideas across borders of democratic and totalitarian regimes alike. Richly illustrated with 100 photographs,
Television before TV finally emphasizes that even without regular programmes, interwar television was widely seen.
List of contents
Acknowledgements, List of Illustrations, List of Abbreviations, Introduction: Interwar Television on Display, 1. Television Display in Context, 2. Spectacularizing Television, or Making Sense of Novelty, 3. Locating Television Between Imaginaries and Materialities, Intermission I: Four Dispositifs of Interwar Television, 4. Nationalizing Television in a Transnational Context, Intermission II: Travelling Exhibits, 5. Domesticating Television Outside the Home, 6. Gendering Television On and Off Screen, Intermission III: Similar Sets, Same TV?, Epilogue: Television Experiments, Past and Present, Full Bibliography, Index
About the author
Anne-Katrin Weber is a television historian with a special interest in non-institutional televisual uses and technologies. Her work is at the intersection of media history and archaeology, science and technology studies, and exhibition studies. She holds a PhD from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and is currently a NOMIS Fellow at
eikones. Centre for the Theory and History of the Image (University of Basel). Her research has been published in English and French; she has edited several journal issues and volumes.
