Below is a list of useful works on melodrama. They are divided into different sections, though these do of course overlap. It’s a work in progress, so do email me at sp458@kent.ac.uk if you have any suggestions as to other references to add.
| GENERAL MELODRAMA
Single-authored books Barefoot, Guy. Gaslight Melodrama: From Victorian London to 1940s Hollywood. New York: Continuum, 2001. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. Yale University Press, 1995. Kaplan, E. Ann. Motherhood and Representation: the Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. London; New York: Routledge, 1992. Nikolopoulou, Anastasia. Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre. Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.
Edited books Bratton, Jacky, Jim Cook, Christine Gledhill, eds. Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen. London: British Film Institute, 1994.
FILM MELODRAMA Co-authored books Mercer, John and Martin Shingler. Melodrama : Genre, Style, Sensibility. London ; New York : Wallflower, 2004. Edited books Gledhill, Christine, ed. Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. London: BFI Pub., 1987. Chapters/articles “Melodrama.” Film Criticism. 9(2). 1984-1985 Winter. “Melodrama.” Wide Angle Vol IV nr 2 (1980); p 4-51.
HOLLYWOOD MELODRAMA Single-authored books Byars, Jackie. All that Hollywood Allows: Re-reading gender in 1950s Melodrama. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Cavell, Stanley. Contesting Tears: the Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire : the Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, 1987. Lang, Robert. American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity : Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts. New York : Columbia University Press, 2001. Chapters/articles Cook, Pam. “Melodrama and the Women’s Picture.” In: Screening the Past : Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema. London ; New York : Routledge, 2005. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Classical Hollywood Film and Melodrama.” In: The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, edited by John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson; pp: 272-82 Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Neale, Stephen. “Melodrama and the Woman’s Film.” In: Genre and contemporary Hollywood, edited by Steve Neale. London ; New York : Routledge, 2000. Nowell-Smith, G. “Genre Criticism. Minnelli and Melodrama.” In: Movies and Methods : an Anthology, edited by Bill Nichols. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1976. Singer, Ben. “Female Power in the Serial-queen Melodrama : the Etiology of an Anomaly.” In: Silent Film, edited by Richard Abel. New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 1996. Williams, Linda. “Melodrama Revised.” In: Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, edited by Nick Browne. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
BRITISH MELODRAMA Edited books Aspinall, Sue, and Robert Murphy, eds. Gainsborough Melodrama. British Film Institute, 1983.
INTERNATIONAL MELODRAMA Single-authored books Sadlier, Darlene J., ed. Latin American Melodrama: Passion, Pathos, and Entertainment. University of Illinois Press, 2009. Edited books Dissanayake, Wimal, ed. Melodrama and Asian Cinema. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1993. McHugh, Kathleen, and Nancy Abelmann, eds. South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema. Wayne State University Press, 2005.
MALE MELODRAMA Chapters/articles Fuqua, Joy Van. “‘Can You Feel It, Joe?’: Male Melodrama and the Feeling Man.” Velvet Light Trap. 38: 28-38. 1996 Fall. Lusted, David. “Social Class and the Western as Male Melodrama.” In: The Book of Westerns, edited by Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye. New York: Continuum, 1996. Lutz, Tom. “Men’s Tears and the Roles of Melodrama.” In: Boys Don’t Cry?: Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S., edited by Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis. pp: 185-204. New York : Columbia University Press, 2002. Neale, Steve. “Melo Talk: on the meaning and use of the term ‘melodrama’ in the American trade press.” Velvet Light Trap no. 32 (Fall 1993); p 66-89.
FILM AND TELEVISION MELODRAMA Edited books Landy, Marcia, ed. Imitations of Life: a Reader on Film & Television Melodrama. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Chapters/articles Gledhill, Christine. “Speculations on the relationship between soap opera and melodrama.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video Vol XIV nr 1-2 (July 1992); p 103-124. Kuhn, Annette. “Women’s Genres: Melodrama, Soap Opera and Theory.” Screen, (1984) 25(1).
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