Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama edited by Sarah Hubbard

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. Physicalgesture, 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.

Global Melodrama: Nation, Body, and History in Contemporary Film by Carla Marcantonio

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.

About the author: Carla Marcantonio is an Associate Professor at Loyola Marymount University, USA.  Her articles and essays have been published in such journals as Social Text, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Cineaste, as well as multiple edited books. She received her PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University and her MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder