En savoir plus
Zusatztext This book brings melodrama studies up to date with strongly argued! exciting! original work. It has been many years since melodrama has received such varied and sustained attention in a single volume as we find in Melodrama Unbound! which changes once again how we understand this protean form. Informationen zum Autor Christine Gledhill is a visiting professor in cinema studies at the University of Sunderland. She is the author of Reframing British Cinema, 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion (2003); editor of Home Is Where the Heart Is (1987); and coeditor of Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas Past and Future (2015). Linda Williams is professor emerita in film & media and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (1989/1999); Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (2001); and On The Wire (2014). Klappentext Drawing on new scholarship in transnational theatrical, film, and cultural histories, this collection demonstrates that melodrama speaks to fundamental aspects of modern life and feeling. Contributors articulate new ways of thinking about melodrama that underscore its pervasiveness across national cultures and in a variety of genres. Zusammenfassung For too long melodrama has been associated with outdated and morally simplistic stereotypes of the Victorian stage; for too long film studies has construed it as a singular domestic genre of familial and emotional crises, either subversively excessive or narrowly focused on the dilemmas of women. Drawing on new scholarship in transnational theatrical, film, and cultural histories, this collection demonstrates that melodrama is a transgeneric mode that has long spoken to fundamental aspects of modern life and feeling. Pointing to melodrama’s roots in the ancient Greek combination of melos and drama, and to medieval Christian iconography focused on the pathos of Christ as suffering human body, the volume highlights the importance to modernity of melodrama as a mode of emotional dramaturgy, the social and aesthetic conditions for which emerged long before the French Revolution. Contributors articulate new ways of thinking about melodrama that underscore its pervasiveness across national cultures and in a variety of genres. They examine how melodrama has traveled to and been transformed in India, China, Japan, and South America, whether through colonial circuits or later, globalization; how melodrama mixes with other modes such as romance, comedy, and realism; and finally how melodrama has modernized the dramatic functions of gender, class, and race by orchestrating vital aesthetic and emotional experiences for diverse audiences. Inhaltsverzeichnis Prologue: The Reach of Melodrama, by Christine Gledhill Acknowledgments Introduction, by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams Part I: Melodrama’s Crossmedia, Transnational Histories 1. Unbinding Melodrama, by Matthew Buckley 2. The Passion of Christ and the Melodramatic Imagination, by Richard Allen 3. Boucicault in Bombay: Global Theater Circuits and Domestic Melodrama in the Parsi Theater, by Kathryn Hansen 4. Global Melodrama and Transmediality in Turn-of-the-Century Japan, by Hannah Airriess 5. Transnational Melodrama, Wenyi, and the Orphan Imagination, by Zhen Zhang 6. Performing/Acting Melodrama, by Helen Day-Mayer and David Mayer 7. Melodrama and the Making of Hollywood, by Hilary A. Hallett 8. Modernizing Melodrama: The Petrified Forest on American Stage and Screen (1935–1936), by Martin Shingler 9. One Suffers but One Learns: Melodrama and the Rules of Lack of Limits, by Carlos Monsiváis (trans. Kathleen M. Vernon) 10. World and Time: Serial Television Melodrama in America, by Linda Williams 11. Melodrama’s “Authenticity” in Carl Th. Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne...