The book relates to now-traditional ideas within the discipline of Film Studies, that there are significant insights as well as pleasures to be gleaned by the very close analysis of a single text. While one film lies at the centre of the book, it opens out to touch on other films by the same writer, director, and stars; to other films in the same genre, set in the same location, and made within the same time period. Thus a single object of study is subjected to multiple analytic perspectives, like a kaleidoscope which keeps the same basic shapes and colours but which has a shifting central picture depending on the turn of the lenses. My path to this 2015 book was laid down about a decade before I wrote it, when, as a junior academic just starting to teach and research, I was made aware by my PhD supervisor and work mentors of the importance of publishing, of establishing a profile beyond the doctorate, on which I was still working. A colleague who had written a short introductory book to a key genre suggested I contact his publisher and see if he would be interested in a book on the romantic comedy, the genre most obviously fitting the type of film I was investigating for my PhD. The publisher, Wallflower Press, did commission my book, which was published as Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre in 2007. 

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In this I examined the key repeated themes and tropes of the romcom and charted shifts in these over time, starting with the screwball comedy in the 1930s and ending in the mid-2000s. The book was well-received and continues to attract positive attention; while I have subsequently worked on other genres, I feel a gravitational pull back to the romantic comedy and often return to investigating its latest evolutions. I think knowledge of this book sent the BFI to me when they wanted a close study of When Harry Met Sally… and I was so delighted to be able to spend some time probing its architecture and themes, seeing how it incorporated many of the established elements of the genre, and set up new ones which have now themselves become classic parts of the contemporary films of this kind.