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I - Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Wimal Dissanayake
Affiliation:
Institute of Culture and Communication, East-West Center
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Summary

“Melodrama” comes from the Greek word melos, meaning song and originally denoted a stage play accompanied by music. According to the early nineteenth-century use of the term, melodrama meant a romantic and sentimental play that contained songs and music deemed appropriate for enhancing the situations presented on stage. It is generally believed that the French writer Jean Jacques Rousseau first used the term melodrame in this sense. “Pygmalion,” with liberetto by Rousseau, was first performed in Lyon in 1770, and is considered the first melodrama in the West. From France, the term spread to other European cultures. In later times, music ceased to be an integral part of melodrama, and the term came to signify a form of drama characterized by sensationalism, emotional intensity, hyperbole, strong action, violence, rhetorical excesses, moral polarities, brutal villainy and its ultimate elimination, and the triumph of good. The words melodrama and melodramatic, which were originally applied to stage plays, later came to be used to describe and evaluate aspects of literature and film.

Until very recent times, the term melodrama was used pejoratively to typify inferior works of art that subscribed to an aesthetic of hyperbole, and which were given to sensationalism and the crude manipulation of the audiences' emotions (Brooks 1976). However, the past fifteen years or so has seen a distinct rehabilitation of the term within film studies with the reexamination of such issues as the nature of representation in cinema and the role of ideology and female subjectivity in films.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1993

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  • Introduction
  • Edited by Wimal Dissanayake
  • Book: Melodrama and Asian Cinema
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139172523.001
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  • Introduction
  • Edited by Wimal Dissanayake
  • Book: Melodrama and Asian Cinema
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139172523.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Edited by Wimal Dissanayake
  • Book: Melodrama and Asian Cinema
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139172523.001
Available formats
×