Mexican Melodrama offers a timely look at critically acclaimed films that serve as key referents in discussions of Mexican cinema. Elena Lahr-Vivaz artfully portrays the dominant conventions of historical and contemporary Mexican cinema, showing how new-wave directors draw from a previous generation to produce meaning in the present.

Global Melodrama is the first booklength work to investigate melodrama in a specifically twenty-first century setting across regional and national boundaries, analyzing film texts from a variety of national contexts in the wake of globalization.

This book investigates the narrative of nationhood during the Italian Risorgimento and its ability to reach a new and wider audience. In Italy, an extraordinary emotional excitement pervaded the struggle for national independence, suffusing the speeches and actions of patriots. This book shows how this ardour borrowed the tones, figures and spectacular nature of the melodramatic imagination feeding the theatre and literature of the time, and how it could resonate with a largely uneducated audience. An important contribution to the new historiography on the Italian Risorgimento and on nineteenth-century nationalism in Europe, it offers a fresh perspective on the public sphere during the Risorgimento, focusing on the transnational links between political mobilisation and the growth of new media and burgeoning mass culture.

For too long melodrama has been associated with outdated and morally simplistic stereotypes of the Victorian stage; for too long film studies has construed it as a singular domestic genre of familial and emotional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

Explores issues of representation and rebellion in Mexican and Mexican American cinema.

This book investigates the portrayal of nationalities and sexualities in British post-Second World War crime film and melodrama. By focussing on these genres, and looking at the concept of melodrama as an analytical tool apt for the analysis of both sexuality and nation, the book offers insight into the desires, fears, and anxieties of post-war culture. The problem of returning to ‘normalcy’ after the war is one of the recurring themes discussed; alienation from society, family, and the self were central issues for both women and men in the post-war years, and the book examines the anxieties surrounding these social changes in the films of the period. In particular, it explores heterosexuality and nationality as some of the most prominent frameworks for the construction of identities in our time, structures that, for all their centrality, are made invisible in our culture.

Examining the theoretical, historical, and contemporary impact of South Korea's Golden Age of cinema.

This insightful analysis of popular Bombay cinema presents a comprehensive discussion of its contemporary history, background, financing and social and political underpinnings. It maps the cultural landscape of this medium, tracing the relationship between the state, nation, cinema and society. It reviews the ways in which gender and sexuality are articulated in their cinematic organisation and representation, and demonstrates how heterosexuality operates as a stabiliser within this constellation. More generally, it looks at the emergence of heroes and anti-heroes, at the changing faces of masculinity, at femininity and the regulation of desire, and at Bollywood's construction of gender, sexuality and the nation.

Television is the cultural form that binds together the nation of Egypt. This text analyses Egyptian TV, not only to provide an understanding of the effect of the medium on Egyptian people, but also to examine TVs greater role in culture.

In the late nineteenth century, melodramas were spectacular entertainment for Americans. They were also a key forum in which elements of American culture were represented, contested, and inverted. This book focuses specifically on the construction of the Mormon villain as rapist, murderer, and Turk in anti-Mormon melodramas. These melodramas illustrated a particularly religious world-view that dominated American life and promoted the sexually conservative ideals of the cult of true womanhood. They also examined the limits of honorable violence, and suggested the whiteness of national ethnicity. In investigating the relationship between theatre, popular literature, political rhetoric, and religious fervor, Megan Sanborn Jones reveals how anti-Mormon melodramas created a space for audiences to imagine a unified American identity.