Richard Dyer Reader

Richard Dyer is a foundational figure for the critical study of cinema and popular culture. Across a career spanning five decades, he has made path breaking contributions to our understanding of stardom and celebrity, gay and queer politics and cultural history, film music, race and whiteness and the pleasures of popular entertainment.

The Richard Dyer Reader brings together for the first time key writings by this vital and influential figure, many of which are not otherwise available. The anthology guides readers through Dyer’s prolific and rich output through six thematic selections of essays and extracts, each centred on a key theme in Dyer's work: stardom and the image; entertainment and ideology; gay politics and representation; whiteness; the pleasures of popular entertainment, and textual analysis. A seventh section comprises a selection of interviews conducted across the span of his career, as well as a new interview with editors Glyn Davis and Jaap Kooijman.

The book will provide an introduction for those new to Dyer’s writings, as well as offering a fresh perspective for readers with a more comprehensive knowledge of his work. The collection includes archival and recent pieces of writing never previously anthologised, newly commissioned essays, a substantial introduction to Dyer’s life and work and framing introduction to each section.

Richard Dyer is Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at King's College London, UK. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, recipient of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies' Lifetime Achievement Award, and of Honorary Lifetime Membership of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. His pioneering work on gay and lesbian representation and on popular entertainment has been published in books including Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film (1990); White (1993); Stars (2nd edition, BFI, 1998); Pastiche (2006); In the Space of a Song (2011); Nino Rota: Music, Film and Feeling (BFI, 2010) and Lethal Repetition: Serial Killing in European Cinema (BFI, 2015). He is the author of BFI Film Classics on Se7en (1997); Brief Encounter (2015) and La dolce vita (2017 and 2020). He is a writer and reviewer for outlets including Sight & Sound, The Atlantic, BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service.

Glyn Davis is Professor of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, UK. Jaap Kooijman is Associate Professor in Media Studies and American Studies at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.