Introduction

Over the past two decades, scholarly understanding of melodrama has undergone a change so dramatic as to beggar belief. In 1992, when my own attention was first drawn to it as an object of study, critical discussion of melodrama was rising but sparse and, with few exceptions, remained limited to the (then) almost completely separate fields of nineteenth-century theatre history (where it denoted the creaky Victorian drama of mustachioed villains and victims tied to the tracks that Ibsen consigned to oblivion) and American popular film and television studies (where the term applied to early cinematic adaptations of stage melodrama and, later, dramas produced to make women cry). The landmark works of Nicholas Vardac, Michael Booth, Frank Rahill, Thomas Elsaesser, David Thorburn, Martha Vicinus, Peter Brooks, and Christine Gledhill had laid the foundation for a thorough revision of scholarly ideas; however, in both theatre and film scholarship melodrama was generally spoken of and understood – as it had been spoken of and understood for almost two centuries and almost from the moment of its appearance – as a marginal, ephemeral form of ‘illiterate’ popular drama, successful in certain eras with the most degraded mass audiences but at odds with, and rendered thankfully obsolete by, a presumably dominant modern impulse toward ‘realism.’

By 2002, however – after a decade punctuated by major works of historical recovery, marked by a radical revision of the genre’s status in film theory, and crowded, toward its end, by new studies of melodrama in other, often non-Western contexts – critical discussion was ranging widely and scholarly understandings of melodrama had been rethought. Building upon Booth’s decades-long re-examination of melodrama’s place on the nineteenth-century stage and on a rapid re-evaluation of the genre’s history in film, such work made it strikingly clear that melodrama’s success in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been not occasional but sustained, even inexorable. Rather than being confined to its most limited and cliché generic forms, melodrama, it now seemed apparent, had suffused the entire range of dramatic sub-genres and genres, migrated into other narrative modes, and adapted seamlessly to new media. Melodrama in this expanded, modal sense – as a distinctive ‘drama of excess’ organized around a strikingly formulaic set of affective techniques and conventions – appeared to dominate both the history of the Victorian stage and that of Hollywood cinema as well as of TV and to have played not a subordinate but a central role in modern narratives of all sorts, including those, like the realist novel or documentary film, that were traditionally seen as having marked melodrama’s demise. At the same time, building on Peter Brooks’s paradigm-shifting recognition that melodrama was not simply a genre or a mode but a ‘central poetry’ of modern life, interdisciplinary scholars explored its powerful, formative role in modern practices of spectatorship, perception, and emotional expression and in the articulation and experience of modern cultural discourses of many different kinds (from abolitionism, temperance, domesticity, and imperialism to the modern construction of race and gender). Such work suggested, with increasingly compelling force, that melodrama was less at odds with dominant modern impulses than profoundly aligned with them and even constitutive of modern consciousness.

In the past decade, discussion of the implications of this radical reassessment of melodrama’s importance to modernity at large have grown in force and scope. Contemporary historians of film and television – the first areas in which melodrama scholarship gained theoretical coherence and still, without question, the area in which the finest theoretical work is being done – are grappling with the recognition that melodrama has been a genealogical constant in the histories of both media. And scholars of Victorian theatre, similarly, are now well along in developing a new theatre history that places melodrama at the centre rather than the margins of the stage and the culture of the time, finding in it not only the most vital and resonant genre of the century but a powerful and pervasive influence on subsequent theatrical innovations (including, not least, what we call “dramatic realism” and much of what we call “dramatic modernism”). At the same time, scholars...