Introduction

The genesis of this book is long and worth reconstructing. It is an allegory of sorts that involves many of the debates that have shaped audience study in recent years. Audience study in the late 1980s was fraught with both a sense of mission and a sense that no one had yet got it right. Its sense of mission had to do with the proliferation of work about the audience across various fields and disciplines. The sense that no one had got it right, however, was just as much the result of its dispersal. This book grew out of the sense of excitement and frustration surrounding the convergence and realignment of multiple disciplines and sites where studies about audience were being done at that time.