Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays anthologises thirty-seven scholarly essays written by Colin McArthur between 1966 and 2022. Organised chronologically, containing works published in all decades between the 1960s and 2020s, and including twenty-one essays hitherto out-ofprint and a new authorial afterword, the book identifies and illustrates the central strands of critical enquiry and approach animating one of British Film Studies’ and Scottish Cultural Studies’ most pioneering, prolific and polemic careers. McArthur's multifaceted interests and achievements include: his role in legitimising the analysis of Classical Hollywood genre cinema within Anglophone Film Studies; his leadership, inspirational and controversial in equal parts, in establishing Scotland's cinematic representation as an accepted and widely practiced object of study; and his imaginative and informed interrogation of Scotland's distinctive identity and presence as a visual and material cultural signifier within a diverse range of domestic and international popular cultural traditions from the eighteenth century until the present. As well as showcasing an important individual contribution to the disciplines of Film Studies and Scottish Cultural Studies, therefore, collecting these essays together also illuminates key aspects of those disciplines’ respective post-1960 histories and trajectories. Many of the following essays contain new authorial and editorial annotation that aims to illustrate and explain the ways in and extent to which this is so.

McArthur's publishing career incorporates numerous monographs, edited anthologies, print journalism, scholarly book chapters and academic journal articles. Because they have until now represented perhaps the most logistically dispersed and least practicably accessible areas of his oeuvre, this volume focuses (with four exceptions) exclusively on the latter two categories. The exceptions to that editorial rule are as follows. An extended extract from McArthur's 1972 monograph Underworld U.S.A. is presented to underscore his significance as a pioneering Anglophone historian and theorist of Classical Hollywood cinema and to illustrate a transitional moment in early-1970s Anglophone Film Studies where auteurist theoretical approaches of the previous decade came into initial contact with structuralist and semiological counterparts that shaped the discipline's evolution during the 1970s. A transcript of a 1988 invited lecture, ‘The New Scottish Cinema?’ makes that work generally available for the first time and provides a useful snapshot of McArthur's thinking at the end of a decade during which his better-known published works on Scottish cinema history and theory comprehensively transformed academic awareness of and approaches to that subject.