Carolyn Williams - The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama

The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama

This newly commissioned series of essays by leading scholars is the first volume to offer both an overview of the field and currently 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 subgenres, 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.

Carolyn Williams is Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is the author of Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (2010) and Transfigured World: Walter Pater s Aesthetic Historicism (1989), and is the co-editor (with Laurel Brake and Lesley Higgins) of Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (2002).

A complete list of books in the series is

The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama

Edited by

Carolyn Williams

Rutgers University

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107095939

DOI : 10.1017/9781316155875

Cambridge University Press 2018

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2018

Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names : Williams, Carolyn, 1950 editor.

Title : The Cambridge companion to English melodrama / edited by Carolyn Williams.

Description : Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers : LCCN 2018022346| ISBN 9781107095939 (hardback) | ISBN 9781107479593 (paperback)

Subjects : LCSH : Melodrama, English History and criticism.

Classification