Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts / Edition 1

by Ben Singer

Overview

In this groundbreaking investigation into the nature and meanings of melodrama in American culture between 1880 and 1920, Ben Singer offers a challenging new reevaluation of early American cinema and the era that spawned it. Singer looks back to the sensational or "blood and thunder" melodramas (e.g., The Perils of Pauline, The Hazards of Helen, etc.) and uncovers a fundamentally modern cultural expression, one reflecting spectacular transformations in the sensory environment of the metropolis, in the experience of capitalism, in the popular imagination of gender, and in the exploitation of the thrill in popular amusement. Written with verve and panache, and illustrated with 100 striking photos and drawings, Singer's study provides an invaluable historical and conceptual map both of melodrama as a genre on stage and screen and of modernity as a pivotal idea in social theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231113298
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	04/05/2001
Series:	Film and Culture Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	7.10(w) x 9.80(h) x 0.90(d)
Lexile:	1560L (what's this?)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ben Singer is assistant professor of film studies at University of Wisconsin - Madison.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Meanings of Modernity
2. Meanings of Melodrama
3. Sensationalism and the World of Urban Modernity
4. Making Sense of the Modernity Thesis
5. Melodrama and the Consequences of Capitalism
6. Ten-Twenty-Thirty Melodrama: Boom and Bust
7. "Child of Commerce! Bastard of Art!'': Early Film Melodrama
8. Power and Peril in the Serial-Queen Melodrama
9. Marketing Melodrama: Serials and Intertextuality
Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Richard Abel

A challenging, alternative history... Singer's book is nothing less than sensational.

— Richard Abel, Ellis and Nelle Levitt professor of English, Drake University

Editorial Reviews

A fluent, precise, and excellently historicized account of the interaction between early narrative film and the processes of industrial modernization.

Modernism/Modernity

A remarkably readable work on the contextual relationship of modernity to stage and screen melodramas in the early 20th century.... He accompanies his text with one of the best and most unusual selections of illustrated materials this reviewer has ever seen... He elucidates the cluster ideas of both melodrama and modernity with uncommon good sense and clarity. Highly recommended.

Choice - T. Lindvall

Singer's excellent monography Melodrama and Modernity operates firmly within this historiographic field.

Cinema and Its Context - Melanie Nash

Singer's excellent monography Melodrama and Modernity operates firmly within this historiographic field.

— Melanie Nash

Cinema and Its Context

A remarkably readable work on the contextual relationship of modernity to stage and screen melodramas in the early 20th century.... He accompanies his text with one of the best and most unusual selections of illustrated materials this reviewer has ever seen... He elucidates the cluster ideas of both melodrama and modernity with uncommon good sense and clarity. Highly recommended.

— T. Lindvall

Choice

This text examines the melodrama of American popular theater and film between 1880 and 1920. Singer (affiliation not cited) considers melodrama as a product and a reflection of "modernity's experiential qualities, its ideological fluctuations, its cultural anxieties, its intertextual cross-currents, its social demographics, and its commercial practices"<-->(from the introduction). Coverage includes the "serial queens," the boom and bust of the popularly-priced "10-20- 30" stage melodramas and early film serials, and the marketing of film serials. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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