Melodrama Unbound
Across History, Media, and National Cultures
Sous la direction de Christine Gledhill et Linda Williams
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Description de l'ouvrage:
For too long melodrama has been associated with outdated and morally simplistic stereotypes of the Victorian stage; for too long film studies has construed it as a singular domestic genre of familial and emotional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.
À propos des auteurs :
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).
Revue de Presse:
Two of the most brilliant and lucid writers on film melodrama have put together this wonderful anthology that both consolidates and clarifies thinking about the topic and opens out the field, placing film melodrama more precisely and securely in relation to its theatrical and literary antecedents and extending consideration from well beyond the confines of Europe and North America. A hand-picked roster of contributors confirm the unbounded scope of the collection and demonstrate the importance and range of melodrama and above all the complexity, ideological urgency, and intoxicating pleasures of its emotions. Richard Dyer, King’s College London and St. Andrews University
Melodrama Unbound extends the already robust feminist analysis of melodramatic modes into transmedial, transnational, and philosophical scenes. It addresses from diverse viewpoints how the emotional encounter with the artwork becomes generally held. The writing is diverse, vivid, and conceptually challenging in all the best senses. Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago
What riches the reader will find in this volume! Its vision is rigorously transmedial and transnational. Within this expansive framework, a wide variety of essays "unbind" melodrama from critical misconceptions that have hindered our understanding of its importance, its pervasiveness, and its power as a mode that continues to flourish in a magnificent proliferation of genres, media, art forms, and forms of social expression. Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University
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. Robert Lang, author of American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli
Voir le site internet de l'éditeur Columbia University Press
> Des mêmes auteurs :
Doing Women's Film History (2015)
Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future
Dir. Christine Gledhill et Julia Knight
Hard Core (1999)
Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible", Expanded edition
Sujet : Genre > Porn films
> Sur un thème proche :
Transatlantic Television Drama (2019)
Industries, Programs, and Fans
Melodrama After the Tears (2016)
New Perspectives on the Politics of Victimhood
Dir. Scott Loren et Jörg Metelmann
Mourning Films (2012)
A Critical Study of Loss and Grieving in Cinema
Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building (2019)
National Sentiments, Transnational Realities, 1897-1940
Sujet : Countries > Latin America