Melodrama Unbound

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).

• Prologue: The Reach of Melodrama, by Christine GledhillAcknowledgmentsIntroduction, by Christine Gledhill and Linda WilliamsPart I: Melodrama’s Crossmedia, Transnational Histories1. Unbinding Melodrama, by Matthew Buckley2. The Passion of Christ and the Melodramatic Imagination, by Richard Allen3. Boucicault in Bombay: Global Theater Circuits and Domestic Melodrama in the Parsi Theater, by Kathryn Hansen4. Global Melodrama and Transmediality in Turn-of-the-Century Japan, by Hannah Airriess5. Transnational Melodrama, Wenyi, and the Orphan Imagination, by Zhen Zhang6. Performing/Acting Melodrama, by Helen Day-Mayer and David Mayer7. Melodrama and the Making of Hollywood, by Hilary A. Hallett8. Modernizing Melodrama: The Petrified Forest on American Stage and Screen (1935–1936), by Martin Shingler9. 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 Williams11. Melodrama’s “Authenticity” in Carl Th. Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, by Amanda DoxtaterPart II: Cultural and Aesthetic Debates12. “Tales of Sound and Fury . . .” or, The Elephant of Melodrama, by Linda Williams13. Repositioning Excess: Romantic Melodrama’s Journey from Hollywood to China, by Panpan Yang14. Melodrama and the Aesthetics of Emotion, by E. Deidre Pribram15. Expressionist Aurality: The Stylized Aesthetic of Bhava in Indian Melodrama, by Ira Bhaskar16. The Sorrow and the Piety: Melodrama Rethought in Postwar Italian Cinema, by Louis Bayman17. Costumes as Melodrama: Super Fly, Male Costume, and the Larger-Than-Life, by Drake Stutesman18. Melodrama and Apocalypse: Politics and the Melodramatic Mode in Contagion, by Despina Kakoudaki19. Even More Tears: The Historical Time Theory of Melodrama, by Jane M. GainesBibliographyContributor BiographiesIndex

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.