Melodrama unbound
across history, media, and national cultures

For too long melodrama has been associated with outdated and morally simplistic stereotypes of the Victorian stage; for too long film studies has construed it as a singular domestic genre of familial and emotional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.

Intro -- Table of Contents -- 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 d'Arc, by Amanda Doxtater -- Part II: Cultural and Aesthetic Debates -- 12. "Tales of Sound and Fury . . ." or, The Elephant of Melodrama, by Linda Williams -- 13. Repositioning Excess: Romantic Melodrama's Journey from Hollywood to China, by Panpan Yang -- 14. Melodrama and the Aesthetics of Emotion, by E. Deidre Pribram -- 15. Expressionist Aurality: The Stylized Aesthetic of Bhava in Indian Melodrama, by Ira Bhaskar -- 16. The Sorrow and the Piety: Melodrama Rethought in Postwar Italian Cinema, by Louis Bayman -- 17. Costumes as Melodrama: Super Fly, Male Costume, and the Larger-Than-Life, by Drake Stutesman

18. Melodrama and Apocalypse: Politics and the Melodramatic Mode in Contagion, by Despina Kakoudaki -- 19. Even More Tears: The Historical Time Theory of Melodrama, by Jane M. Gaines -- Bibliography -- Contributor Biographies -- Index