This newly commissioned series of essays by leading scholars is the first volume to offer both an overview of the field and also current emerging critical views on the history, form, and influence of English melodrama. Authoritative voices provide an introduction to melodrama's early formal features such as tableaux and music, and trace the development of the genre in the nineteenth century through the texts and performances of its various sub-genres, the theatres within which the plays were performed, and the audiences who watched them. The historical contexts of melodrama are considered through essays on topics including contemporary politics, class, gender, race, and empire. And the extensive influences of melodrama are demonstrated through a wide-ranging assessment of its ongoing and sometimes unexpected expressions - in psychoanalysis, in other art forms (the novel, film, television, musical theatre), and in popular culture generally - from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

A lively and accessible account of the most popular form of nineteenth-century English theatre, and its continuing influence today.

About the Author
Carolyn Williams is Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University, New Jersey. She is the author of Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (2010), Transfigured World: Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism (1990) and the co-edited collection of essays (with Laurel Brake and Lesley Higgins), Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (2003).


Book Information
ISBN 9781107479593
Author Carolyn Williams
Format Paperback
Page Count 330
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 570g
Dimensions(mm) 227mm * 152mm * 16mm