Hollywood's Melodramatic Imagination - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Hollywood's Melodramatic Imagination write by Geoff Mayer. This book was released on 2021-12-09. Hollywood's Melodramatic Imagination available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
Melodrama!
Melodrama! - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Melodrama! write by Frank Kelleter. This book was released on 2007. Melodrama! available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This volume explores the current status quo of 'melodrama studies' with respect to theater, prose writing, film, and other genres and forms, spanning a historical range from the eighteenth century to the present time. It starts from the observation that what used to be regarded as a lower form of cultural expression in the first half of the twentieth century, came to be reevaluated markedly in the last decades. These days, melodrama tends to be invoked as a serious and central category to assess the modern cultural imagination and imaginary. Moreover, at a time in which generic classification is becoming increasingly problematical, because genres, be they literary or filmic, are identified less with stable norms, and are understood increasingly as processes, melodrama gains an especially prominent function in literary and cultural studies, since it is seen as cutting across the field of generic identification. The contributions to this volume investigate different manifestations of melodrama and emphasize the multifaceted and heterogeneous character of the melodramatic mode.
Melodrama Unbound
Melodrama Unbound - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Melodrama Unbound write by Christine Gledhill. This book was released on 2018-05-08. Melodrama Unbound available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods
Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods write by Dale Hudson. This book was released on 2017-05-18. Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The figure of the vampire serves as both object and mode of analysis for more than a century of Hollywood filmmaking. Never dying, shifting shape and moving at unnatural speed, as the vampire renews itself by drinking victims' blood, so too does Hollywood renew itself by consuming foreign styles and talent, moving to overseas locations, and proliferating in new guises. In Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods, Dale Hudson explores the movement of transnational Hollywood's vampires, between low-budget quickies and high-budget franchises, as it appropriates visual styles from German, Mexican and Hong Kong cinemas and off-shores to Canada, Philippines, and South Africa. As the vampire's popularity has swelled, vampire film and television has engaged with changing discourses around race and identity not always addressed in realist modes. Here, teen vampires comfort misunderstood youth, chador-wearing skateboarder vampires promote transnational feminism, African American and Mexican American vampires recover their repressed histories. Looking at contemporary hits like True Blood, Twilight, Underworld and The Strain, classics such as Universal's Dracula and Dracula, and miscegenation melodramas like The Cheat and The Sheik, the book reconfigures Hollywood historiography and tradition as fundamentally transnational, offering fresh interpretations of vampire media as trans-genre sites for political contestation.
Imitations of Life
Imitations of Life - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Imitations of Life write by Marcia Landy. This book was released on 1991. Imitations of Life available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. On melodrama.
