We seem to see melodrama everywhere we look—from the soliloquies of devastation in a Dickens novel to the abject monstrosity of Frankenstein’s creation, and from Louise Brooks’s exaggerated acting in Pandora’s Box to the vicissitudes endlessly reshaping the life of a brooding Don Draper. This anthology proposes to address the sometimes bewilderingly broad understandings of melodrama by insisting on the historical specificity of its genesis on the stage in late-eighteenth-century Europe. Melodrama emerged during this time in the metropolitan centers of London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin through stage adaptations of classical subjects and gothic novels, and they became famous for their use of passionate expression and spectacular scenery. Yet, as contributors to this volume emphasize, early melodramas also placed sound at center stage, through their distinctive—and often disconcerting—alternations between speech and music. This book draws out the melo of melodrama, showing the crucial dimensions of sound and music for a genre that permeates our dramatic, literary, and cinematic sensibilities today. A richly interdisciplinary anthology, The Melodramatic Moment will open up new dialogues between musicology and literary and theater studies.

A lively and accessible account of the most popular form of nineteenth-century English theatre, and its continuing influence today.

The genre of mélodrame à grand spectacle that emerged in the boulevard theatres of Paris in the 1790s - and which was quickly exported abroad - expressed the moral struggle between good and evil through a drama of heightened emotions. Physical gesture, mise en scène and music were as important in communicating meaning and passion as spoken dialogue. The premise of this volume is the idea that the melodramatic aesthetic is central to our understanding of nineteenth-century music drama, broadly defined as spoken plays with music, operas and other hybrid genres that combine music with text and/or image. This relationship is examined closely, and its evolution in the twentieth century in selected operas, musicals and films is understood as an extension of this nineteenth-century aesthetic. The book therefore develops our understanding of opera in the context of melodrama's broader influence on musical culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book will appeal to those interested in film studies, drama, theatre and modern languages as well as music and opera.

This book examines melodramatic impulses in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, as well as the series' film adaptations and fan-authored texts. Attention to conventions such as crying, victimization, and happy endings in the context of the Twilight-Jane Eyre relationship reveals melodrama as an empowering mode of communication for girls. Although melodrama has saturated popular culture since the nineteenth century, its expression in texts for, about, and by girls has been remarkably under theorized. By defining melodrama, however, through its Victorian lineages, Katie Kapurch recognizes melodrama's aesthetic form and rhetorical function in contemporary girl culture while also demonstrating its legacy since the nineteenth century. Informed by feminist theories of literature and film, Kapurch shows how melodrama is worthy of serious consideration since the mode critiques limiting social constructions of postfeminist girlhood and, at the same time, enhances intimacy between girls—both characters and readers.

Provides an introduction to analysing media texts. This book with its award winning DVD, helps students learn how to do semiotic, genre and narrative analysis, content and discourse analysis, and engage with debates about the politics of representation.

Lehman brings together new work on masculinity in film by established film scholars, new academics, performance artists, and cultural critics. The essays analyze trends from the role of gay men in saving heterosexuality to the emergence of new queer cinema.

Blackford finds the basis of Mockingbird's broad appeal in its ability to embody the mainstream culture of romantics like Emerson and social reform writers like Stowe, even as alternative canons---southern gothic, deadpan humor, queer literatures, regional women's novels---lurk in its subtexts. Central to her argument is the notion of "passing": establishing an identity that conceals the inner self so that one can function within a closed social order. For example, the novel's narrator, Scout, must suppress her natural tomboyishness to become a "lady." Meanwhile, Scout's father, Atticus Finch, must contend with competing demands of thoughtfulness, self-reliance, and masculinity that ultimately stunt his effectiveness within an unjust society. Blackford charts the identity dilemmas of other key characters---the mysterious Boo Radley, the young outsider Dill (modeled on Lee's lifelong friend Truman Capote), the oppressed victim Tom Robinson---in similarly intriguing ways.

Passions of the Sign traces the impact of the French Revolution on Enlightenment thought in Germany as evidenced in the work of three major figures around the turn of the nineteenth century: Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist. Andreas Gailus examines a largely overlooked strand in the philosophical and literary reception of the French Revolution, one which finds in the historical occurrence of revolution the expression of a fundamental mechanism of political, conceptual, and aesthetic practice. With a close reading of a critical essay by Kleist, an in-depth discussion of Kant's philosophical writing, and new readings of the novella form as employed by both Goethe and Kleist, Gailus demonstrates how these writers set forth an energetic model of language and subjectivity whose unstable nature reverberates within the very foundations of society. Unfolding in the medium of energetic signs, human activity is shown to be subject to the counter-symbolic force that lies within and beyond it. History is subject to contingency and is understood not as a progressive narrative but as an expanse of revolutionary possibilities; language is subject to the extra-linguistic context of utterance and is conceived primarily not in semantic but in pragmatic terms; and the individual is subject to impersonal affect and is figured not as the locus of self-determination but as the site of passions that exceed the self and its pleasure principle. At once a historical and a conceptual study, this volume moves between literature and philosophy, and between textual analysis and theoretical speculation, engaging with recent discussions on the status of sovereignty, the significance of performative language in politics and art, and the presence of the impersonal, even inhuman, within the economy of the self.

A revisionary study of the impact of Marian Evans's early periodical-press career on her later success as a novelist.

The first collection of critical essays on HBO's The Wire - the most brilliant and socially relevant television series in years The Wire is about survival, about the strategies adopted by those living and working in the inner cities of America. It presents a world where for many even hope isn't an option, where life operates as day-to-day existence without education, without job security, and without social structures. This is a world that is only grey, an exacting autopsy of a side of American life that has never seen the inside of a Starbucks. Over its five season, sixty-episode run (2002-2008), The Wire presented several overlapping narrative threads, all set in the city of Baltimore. The series consistently deconstructed the conventional narratives of law, order, and disorder, offering a view of America that has never before been admitted to the public discourse of the televisual. It was bleak and at times excruciating. Even when the show made metatextual reference to its own world as Dickensian, it was too gentle by half. By focusing on four main topics (Crime, Law Enforcement, America, and Television), The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television examines the series' place within popular culture and its representation of the realities of inner city life, social institutions, and politics in contemporary American society. This is a brilliant collection of essays on a show that has taken the art of television drama to new heights.