Volume 55, Issue 4 (2013) A Dossier of Essays on Melodrama

From the Introduction

"Melodrama has never yet been a term of praise, though its derogatory status has not stopped it from being broadly applied to print and playhouse, across live and film, video, and digitally recorded performances screened at drive-ins, shopping malls, or art-house cinemas, to nondramatic art forms such as novels and paintings, and even to other forms of social or political life susceptible to cultural and rhetorical analysis. We think we know what we mean when we use the term to describe exaggerated emotional manipulation, but slight definitional pressure reveals enormous variation."

Read more in guest editor Marcie Frank's introductory essay…