Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Jonathan Gray calls, in this book, for an ‘off-screen studies’, a discipline (or addition to existing disciplines) that can offer serious academic study of a range of promotional, industrial and audience-based materials. Gray subsumes these materials into the single category (borrowed from Gerard Genette) of ‘paratext’.1 He suggests several times that such a call is innovative (while building on particular books and articles), and that this lack of attention to trailers, posters, websites and action figures is severely limiting academic ability to understand the larger narrative universes being constructed in film, television and other media. However, as demonstrated by Stephen Heath's 1976 statement – ‘A film must never end … it must exist … even before we enter the cinema … a film is a constant doing over again’2 – similar calls for more attention to be given to these various texts are not as infrequent as this book might suggest.3 There is a danger that, despite useful and potent case studies, the book actually fails to engage with the rich and varied work on promotional materials and fan behaviour already taking place within reception and audience studies.
Keith M. Johnston (Thu,) studied this question.