Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures ed. by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (review)

The critical history of melodrama has been wrought with just as much suffering and misunderstanding as we can find in a stereotypical melodramatic plotline, and for a long time, the term itself was used with derision and contempt, identifying melodrama with cheap and exaggerated displays of excessive emotions in formulaic plots, targeting the weaker sex. In the past few decades, however, with more scholarly attention directed at this exciting and surprisingly endemic mode, both the critical and popular appreciation of melodrama have begun to change. Yet, as Melodrama Unbound illustrates, there is still much to do before we may claim to comprehend the concept in its entirety.

The volume is not the first one trying to remedy the situation; Christine Gledhill's ground- breaking essay collection, Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, published by the British Film Institute in 1987, presented the most significant writings on the melodrama from the 1970s and 1980s. That collection already argued convincingly for the need of a critical reconsideration of melodrama, investigating both its historical antecedents and focusing on the best- known auteurs of the melodramatic mode. Melodrama Unbound presents new research from the past three decades, but it is much more than simply a temporal extension of the earlier volume. The editors, Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, both stellar names in melodrama research, have set out to revise the history of the melodrama, liberating ("unbinding") it from long-established clichés, even reinterpreting critical classics, primarily Peter Brooks' seminal 1976 The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess and Thomas Elsaesser's 1987 "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama." In one of her essays, Linda Williams points out how these writings have undoubtedly shaped our current understanding of the mode, but also how they need to be reconsidered in light of new research.

The volume exemplifies that in order to better understand the concept of melodrama itself, it is not enough to focus on a select group of acknowledged masterpieces; rather, one needs to go backwards and forwards in time, as well as follow the diverging branches of new developments and related phenomena, to be able to synthetize what is at the heart of the concept itself. What is more, several of the contributors also undertake to revisit their own earlier standpoints as well, propelling forward the appreciation of melodrama in a variety of ways. Apart from this revisionary intention, the volume's authors also expand the scope of the concept by addressing transmedial and transcultural issues, arguing for a broader geographic scope of the term's applicability by pointing out melodramatic elements in Parsi theatre (Kathryn Hansen), Indian (Ira Bhaskar) and Chinese cinema (Zhen Zhang; Panpan Yang), and Japanese theatre and literature (Hannah Airriess).

The collection is organised into two thematically arranged sections, the first one focusing on the historical and cross media connections informing our current understanding of melodrama. The essays included in this part present a number of transnational journeys the melodrama has made, both from Western Europe to the Americas (Hilary A. Hallett, Carlos Monsiváis), and to the East, but also in the other direction, with cultural phenomena from East and West happily cross-pollinating each other. The second part addresses cultural and aesthetic debates, even philosophical concepts (Jane M. Gaines), but none of these theoretical investigations are disconnected from the historical. One particularly laudable achievement of the volume is the sense of coherence it creates out of its admittedly rather diverse material. The individual essays engage in a close dialogue with each other, confirming each other's insights, and shedding light on several previously neglected aspects of melodrama study, clearly in the spirit of the 2013 conference where much of the volume's material was first presented.

An important emphasis...