Melodrama

Jonathan Goldberg is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English at Emory University and the author of several books, most recently Strangers on a Train: A Queer Film Classic. He is also the author of Willa Cather and Others and editor of Queering the Renaissance, both also published by Duke University Press.

• Preface  ixAcknowledgments  xviiPart I. The Impossible Situation1. Agency and Identity: The Melodrama in Beethoven's Fidelio  32. Identity and Identification: Sirk-Fassbinder-Haynes  23Part II. Melos + Drama3. The Art of Murder: Hitchcock and Highsmith  834. Wildean Aesthetics: From "Paul's Case" to Lucy Gayheart  133Coda  155Notes  169Bibliography  187Index  197

"Apropos of his homo-topics, Goldberg writes beautifully, in prose vulnerable and oppositional that elevates academic vernacular to a higher aesthetic plane.... Lucky for us, Goldberg’s decided we can’t have our Hitchcock without our Highsmith, and aren’t they a lovely pair. He writes about music in Hitchcock (something rarely considered) and explores how Highsmith thematizes music in her novels.... [Y]ou will trust Goldberg’s fast-paced, suspenseful ekphrasis and delight in reliving these extraordinary reversals on the page."- Maxe Crandall (Lambda Literary Review) "Goldberg achieves a greater, more nuanced understanding of melodrama’s potential for artistic and philosophical expression, as well as its unique importance for the study of media, gender, race, and sexuality." - Matthew J. M. Grant (Film Criticism) "Students of melodrama have long been drilled in the term’s literal meaning: music + drama. But before Jonathan Goldberg’s Melodrama, few have had the chance to take the music seriously. With a rare combination of musical expertise and critical acumen, Goldberg puts the pieces together in this book. . . . Exceptional. . . ." - Ned Schantz (Crticism) "Melodrama offers a distinctively queer theoretical contribution to the extensive scholarly work on melodrama in film and literary studies. The book is also a form of critical address that seeks to think with works of art the author clearly identifies with and also identifies as practicing a homo-aesthetics that traverses genres, media, and time." - Victoria Hesford (GLQ)