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List of contents
Introduction: Carole Lombard, The Screwball Girl?
1. "Carole of the Curves" gets Svelt: Carole Lombard Before Screwball Comedy
2. The Queen of Screwball Comedy
3. "Goodbye Carole 'Screwball' Lombard; Hello Mrs. 'Ma' Gable": Gender, Identity and the Classical Hollywood Star Couple
4. Lombard Gets Dramatic: Melodrama, Domesticity and Gendered Performance
5. "If Women Ruled the World": Lombard as Proto-Feminist
Conclusion: Lombard's Legacy (1942-present)
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Olympia Kiriakou is a visiting instructor in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University, USA. Prior joining the FAU faculty, she worked at the Toronto International Film Festival. Her research interests include stardom in the classical Hollywood period, genre studies, Disney studies, and media industries. Her work has been published in Film Matters, Journal of Fandom Studies, and Transformative Works and Cultures.
Summary
Becoming Carole Lombard: Stardom, Comedy and Legacy is a historical critique of the development and reception of Carole Lombard’s stardom from the classical Hollywood period to present day. Based on original archival research, Olympia Kiriakou combines theoretically informed textual analyses of Lombard’s performances and star image across different media (biographies, publicity materials, photography and film) with a critical engagement of the cultural, economic, social and industrial conditions that shaped her stardom.
Sitting at the intersection of feminist film theory, star studies and comedy theory, this work presents Lombard as a case study to challenge the screwball canon and existent academic discourse about female physical comedy and the alleged “delicate” female body. In doing so, it formulates a new historical approach to understanding gender, femininity, and identity in Hollywood comedies of the 1930s. Moreover, this is the first research of its kind to offer a comprehensive understanding of Lombard’s stardom beyond her associations with the screwball comedy genre.
Foreword
Focusing on an often-ignored and misunderstood star of the classical Hollywood period, the book offers a comprehensive study of Carole Lombard’s star persona and films from 1921 to present day.
Additional text
A riveting, insightful, meticulously researched, and highly enjoyable book about an essential Hollywood film star, Becoming Carole Lombard proves that Lombard was much more than just 'the Screwball Girl.' Olympia Kiriakou traces Lombard's shape-shifting star persona across diverse screen genres, revealing the profound historiographic value of her tragically curtailed career for feminist film theory, comedy and performance studies, and the history of American film culture.
