Download or read book The Melodramatic Moment written by Katherine Hambridge and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-07-16 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Melodramatic Imagination written by Peter Brooks and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lucid and fascinating book, Peter Brooks argues that melodrama is a crucial mode of expression in modern literature. After studying stage melodrama as a dominant popular form in the nineteenth century, he moves on to Balzac and Henry James to show how these "realist" novelists created fiction using the rhetoric and excess of melodrama - in particular its secularized conflicts of good and evil, salvation and damnation. The Melodramatic Imagination has become a classic work for understanding theater, fiction, and film.
Download or read book Mia the Melodramatic written by Eileen Boggess and published by Bancroft Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mia is fifteen and during her summer vacation she starts working at a children's playhouse, meets new people (including Eric, who she knew once long ago when he was not so interesting) and continues sibling warfare with her younger brother Chris.
Download or read book Melodramatic Tactics written by Elaine Hadley and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pathbreaking work analyzes melodrama as not merely a theatrical genre but as a behavioral paradigm of the nineteenth century, manifest in the theater, in literature, and in society. It shows how the melodramatic mode reaffirmed the familial, hierarchical, and public grounds for ethical behavior and identity that characterized models of social exchange and organization.
Download or read book The Melodramatic Public written by R. Vasudevan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to say Indian movies are melodramatic? How do film audiences engage with socio-political issues? What role has cinema played in the emergence of new economic forms, consumer cultures and digital technologies in a globalizing India? Ravi Vasudevan addresses these questions in a wide-ranging analysis of Indian cinema.
Download or read book The Melodramatic Thread written by James R. Lehning and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-09 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This ambitious undertaking is concerned with the melodramatic form in theatre and film and its impact on French political culture.” —H-France Review In France, both political culture and theatrical performances have drawn upon melodrama. This “melodramatic thread” helped weave the country’s political life as it moved from monarchy to democracy. By examining the relationship between public ceremonies and theatrical performance, James R. Lehning sheds light on democratization in modern France. He explores the extent to which the dramatic forms were present in the public performance of political power. By concentrating on the Republic and the Revolution and on theatrical performance, Lehning affirms the importance of examining the performative aspects of French political culture for understanding the political differences that have marked France in the years since 1789. “In this thoroughly researched and persuasive book, Lehning provides a fascinating reading of public performances in modern France . . . This is an important contribution to the study of French culture and the democratization process . . . Essential.” —Choice “Lehning’s application of the themes of melodrama to French political culture offers new insights into French history. His style is lively, clear, and highly readable.” —Venita Datta, Wellesley College “The analyses in this book make a real contribution to debates about the ways in which art, particularly popular art, and politics interact; how politics itself is theatrical in the French case; and the role of ritual in politics and the function of politics as ritual and ceremony.” —John Gaffney, Aston University
Download or read book Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth Century London and New York written by Michael V. Pisani and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the nineteenth century, people heard more music in the theatre—accompanying popular dramas such as Frankenstein, Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Corsican Brothers, The Three Musketeers, as well as historical romances by Shakespeare and Schiller—than they did in almost any other area of their lives. But unlike film music, theatrical music has received very little attention from scholars and so it has been largely lost to us. In this groundbreaking study, Michael V. Pisani goes in search of these abandoned sounds. Mining old manuscripts and newspapers, he finds that starting in the 1790s, theatrical managers in Britain and the United States began to rely on music to play an interpretive role in melodramatic productions. During the nineteenth century, instrumental music—in addition to song—was a common feature in the production of stage plays. The music played by instrumental ensembles not only enlivened performances but also served other important functions. Many actors and actresses found that accompanimental music helped them sustain the emotional pitch of a monologue or dialogue sequence. Music also helped audiences to identify the motivations of characters. Playwrights used music to hold together the hybrid elements of melodrama, heighten the build toward sensation, and dignify the tragic pathos of villains and other characters. Music also aided manager-directors by providing cues for lighting and other stage effects. Moreover, in a century of seismic social and economic changes, music could provide a moral compass in an uncertain moral universe. Featuring dozens of musical examples and images of the old theatres, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre charts the progress of the genre from its earliest use in the eighteenth century to the elaborate stage productions of the very early twentieth century.
Download or read book Melodrama written by Jonathan Goldberg and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-21 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a new queer theorization of melodrama, Jonathan Goldberg explores the ways melodramatic film and literature provide an aesthetics of impossibility. Focused on the notion of what Douglas Sirk termed the "impossible situation" in melodrama, such as impasses in sexual relations that are not simply reflections of social taboo and prohibitions, Goldberg pursues films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes that respond to Sirk's prompt. His analysis hones in on melodrama's original definition--a form combining music and drama--as he explores the use of melodrama in Beethoven's opera Fidelio, films by Alfred Hitchcock, and fiction by Willa Cather and Patricia Highsmith, including her Ripley novels. Goldberg illuminates how music and sound provide queer ways to promote identifications that exceed the bounds of the identity categories meant to regulate social life. The interaction of musical, dramatic, and visual elements gives melodrama its indeterminacy, making it resistant to normative forms of value and a powerful tool for creating new potentials.
Download or read book Thomas Hardy Sensationalism and the Melodramatic Mode written by R. Nemesvari and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-04-25 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-length study of sensationalist and melodramatic elements in Hardy's novels uses six of his texts to demonstrate the ways in which Hardy uses the melodramatic mode to advance his critique of established Victorian cultural beliefs through the employment of non-realistic plot devices and sensational 'excess.'
Download or read book Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth Century London and New York written by Michael V. Pisani and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the nineteenth century, people heard more music in the theatre—accompanying popular dramas such as Frankenstein, Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Corsican Brothers, The Three Musketeers, as well as historical romances by Shakespeare and Schiller—than they did in almost any other area of their lives. But unlike film music, theatrical music has received very little attention from scholars and so it has been largely lost to us. In this groundbreaking study, Michael V. Pisani goes in search of these abandoned sounds. Mining old manuscripts and newspapers, he finds that starting in the 1790s, theatrical managers in Britain and the United States began to rely on music to play an interpretive role in melodramatic productions. During the nineteenth century, instrumental music—in addition to song—was a common feature in the production of stage plays. The music played by instrumental ensembles not only enlivened performances but also served other important functions. Many actors and actresses found that accompanimental music helped them sustain the emotional pitch of a monologue or dialogue sequence. Music also helped audiences to identify the motivations of characters. Playwrights used music to hold together the hybrid elements of melodrama, heighten the build toward sensation, and dignify the tragic pathos of villains and other characters. Music also aided manager-directors by providing cues for lighting and other stage effects. Moreover, in a century of seismic social and economic changes, music could provide a moral compass in an uncertain moral universe. Featuring dozens of musical examples and images of the old theatres, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre charts the progress of the genre from its earliest use in the eighteenth century to the elaborate stage productions of the very early twentieth century.
Download or read book Imitations of Life written by Marcia Landy and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On melodrama.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama written by Carolyn Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and accessible account of the most popular form of nineteenth-century English theatre, and its continuing influence today.
Download or read book Hollywood s Melodramatic Imagination written by Geoff Mayer and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-12-22 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melodrama is the foundation of American cinema. It is, however, a poorly understood term. While it is a pervasive and persuasive dramatic mode, it is not tied to any specific moral or ideological system. It is not a singular genre; rather, it operates as a "genre generating machine" capable of determining the aesthetics and structure of the drama within many genres. Melodrama centers the conflict around the clash between good and evil and provides a sense of poetic justice--but the specific values embedded in notions of good and evil are determined by the culture, and they shift from nation to nation, region to region, and period to period. This book explores the "populist" westerns of the 1930s, the propaganda films that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the popularity of Sax Rohmer's master villain Fu Manchu. "Melodramas of passion" and film noir also offer a challenge to melodrama with its seemingly alienated protagonists and downbeat endings. Yet, with few exceptions, Hollywood was able to assimilate these genres within its melodramatic imagination.
Download or read book Melodrama Unbound written by Christine Gledhill and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 761 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Melodramatic Formations written by Bruce A. McConachie and published by Studies Theatre Hist & Culture. This book was released on 1992 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Watching Dallas written by Ien Ang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dallas, one of the great internationally-screened soap operas, offers us first and foremost entertainment. But what is it about Dallas that makes that entertainment so successful, and how exactly is its entertainment constructed?
Download or read book Melodramatic Voices Understanding Music Drama written by Sarah Hibberd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
