'Melodrama of the Dear Old Kind': Sentimentalising British Action Heroines in the 1910s

This paper pays close attention to the serial and 'cinematic' narratives produced in the British press of the 'teens in order to display film's widening reach as a narrative mode mingling action, sentiment, and gender and to historicize debates about genre in film studies. Many filmmakers, publicists and journalists in the 1910s fully understood that melodrama was a radically hybrid form, yet they did not have the same semantic anxieties about juxtaposing multiple, non-hierarchical definitions of melodrama as later genre historians.