Melodrama Unbound

Christine Gledhill is Visiting Professor at the University of Sunderland. She is the editor or co-editor of several titles, most recently Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas Past and Future (University of Illinois Press, 2015).Williams Linda :

Linda Williams is professor in Film & Media and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of several books, including Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (University of California Press, 1999) and On The Wire (Duke University Press, 2014).Christine Gledhill is a visiting professor in cinema studies at the University of Sunderland. She is the author of Reframing British Cinema, 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion (2003); editor of Home Is Where the Heart Is (1987); and coeditor of Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas Past and Future (2015).

Linda Williams is professor emerita in film & media and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (1989/1999); Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (2001); and On The Wire (2014).

Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University:
What riches the reader will find in this volume! Its vision is rigorously transmedial and transnational. Within this expansive framework, a wide variety of essays “unbind” melodrama from critical misconceptions that have hindered our understanding of its importance, its pervasiveness, and its power as a mode that continues to flourish in a magnificent proliferation of genres, media, art forms, and forms of social expression.

Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago:
Melodrama Unbound extends the already robust feminist analysis of melodramatic modes into transmedial, transnational, and philosophical scenes. It addresses from diverse viewpoints how the emotional encounter with the artwork becomes generally held. The writing is diverse, vivid, and conceptually challenging in all the best senses.

Richard Dyer, King’s College London and St. Andrews University:
Two of the most brilliant and lucid writers on film melodrama have put together this wonderful anthology that both consolidates and clarifies thinking about the topic and opens out the field, placing film melodrama more precisely and securely in relation to its theatrical and literary antecedents and extending consideration from well beyond the confines of Europe and North America. A hand-picked roster of contributors confirm the unbounded scope of the collection and demonstrate the importance and range of melodrama and above all the complexity, ideological urgency, and intoxicating pleasures of its emotions.