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22038 results in Cambridge Companions

Page 295 of 1102

  • 19 - Metamodern Melodrama and Contemporary Mass Culture

  • from IV - Extensions of Melodrama
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 289-304

  • Summary

    Cultural theory has been heavily influenced in the postmodern era by the idea that an incredulity towards meta-narratives shapes experience and that sceptical cultural consumers are aware of this. Melodrama offers an alternative conceptual frame for understanding global structures of feeling in a mass media age. This paper argues that the relationship between the melodramatic worldview and the postmodern is dialectical rather than oppositional. The mutually constitutive relationship between absolute and relative ideologies has tended to evade even those theorists of ‘post-postmodernism’ who have sought to reinstate the importance of belief into prevailing intellectual narratives of scepticism or suspicion. Drawing on Vermeulen and van den Akker's concept of ‘metamodernism’, this paper identifies a contemporary form of melodrama that we could label ‘metamodern’ – a term which indicates a dual sensibility which incorporates both scepticism and belief. Focusing on reality TV and sports broadcasting, this paper argues that melodrama is the modern form of the utopic, rooted in the belief system of myth, yet born in response to what Peter Brooks calls ‘the void’ of the modern world.

  • 5 - Domestic Melodrama

  • from I - Histories of English Melodrama
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 61-77

  • Summary

    This chapter argues that ‘domestic melodrama’ is constituted historically in an oscillating dynamic between the ordinary everydayness of domestication and the extraordinary personal extremities and spectacular actions associated with melodrama. What holds these contraries together is a new emphasis on ‘the interesting’, which, intermeshing sensational situations with appeals to shared socio-emotional experiences, produced a pathos that elicited audience empathy. Central to this aesthetic was the new social role of the family as personal site of social cohesion, which replaced the ties of earlier hierarchical and paternalist social organisation under pressure of industrial capitalism and individualism. The chapter explores the interaction between such broad ‘structures of feeling’ and the nightmarish extremities of melodramatic plotting, musicalised rhetoric, and visual staging. It concludes by arguing that, under pressure from middle-class theatrical reform, domestic melodrama provided characters, situations, dramaturgical devices, and reflexive tropes that paved the way not only for popular film and television drama, but for the achievements of twentieth-century drama tout court.

  • 10 - Melodrama and Gender

  • from III - Melodrama and Nineteenth-Century English Culture
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 149-162

  • Summary

    Genre and gender intersect in nineteenth-century melodrama, and melodrama became an important vehicle for thinking about gender in the period. This chapter argues that melodrama is, in all the media of its expression (drama, fiction, and latterly, film) about gender, and reveals the contradictions of gender ideology through heightened modes of performance. The chapter explores the representation of gender roles and social constructions of femininity and masculinity, in well-known domestic and nautical melodramas by Douglas Jerrold and John Thomas Haines. It then goes on to examine the career of Mrs Denvil, a playwright for several East End theatres in the 1840s. Mrs Denvil is an example of the mixed economy of the theatre industry in the first half of the nineteenth century, which was part familial and part commercial. Her work as an adapter of the cheap novels known as ‘penny dreadfuls’ was satirised in Punch, but appreciated in the theatres which staged her work. She is an example of the ways in which women writers of melodrama and sensation put female feeling, action, and agency at the centre of melodramatic texts in theatre, the novel, and (later) in film.

  • 15 - Melodrama in Early Film

  • from IV - Extensions of Melodrama
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 224-244

  • Summary

    The makers of early movies quickly discovered a market for narrative film and adaptations of popular Victorian and Edwardian stage melodramas. Film studios of various sizes, from 1901-1928 (the ‘silent era’), worked their way through the theatrical repertoire with continuing success proving that the taste for these dramas remained alive. Even as modern cinema technology emerged, filmmakers were still resorting to theatrical artifice. The author’s intent is to offer the reader a loose chronology of the practices of turning stage melodramas into popular enduring motion pictures and their variants (such as serials). The author charts the evolution of the music hall dramatic sketch into a film feature and thence to screen melodrama. These surviving films not only permit viewing a range of 19th century theatrical melodramas but also allow scrutiny of the theatre’s means, resources, and methods. From Edison and Porter, through Selig and Biograph (with Griffith), Pathé with Capellani, Collins with Metro, Tourneur with the Shuberts, Gillette with Essanay, Nielsen with Gad, Martin-Harvey with Wilcox, the melodramas unfold. The essay indicates how these films might be readily accessed.

The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin
  • Edited by Joshua L. Cherniss, Steven B. Smith
  • Published online:
    21 September 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018
  • Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) was a central figure in twentieth-century political thought. This volume highlights Berlin's significance for contemporary readers, covering not only his writings on liberty and liberalism, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Russian thinkers and pluralism, but also the implications of his thought for political theory, history, and the social sciences, as well as the ethical challenges confronting political actors, and the nature and importance of practical judgment for politics and scholarship. His name and work are inseparable from the revival of political philosophy and the analysis of political extremism and defense of democratic liberalism following World War II. Berlin was primarily an essayist who spoke through commentary on other authors and, while his own commitments and allegiances are clear enough, much in his thought remains controversial. Berlin's work constitutes an unsystematic and incomplete, but nevertheless sweeping and profound, defense of political, ethical, and intellectual humanism in an anti-humanistic age.

Page 295 of 1102