Melodrama and Modernity

Ben Singer is assistant professor of film studies at University of Wisconsin - Madison.

A remarkably readable work on the contextual relationship of modernity to stage and screen melodramas in the early 20th century... He accompanies his text with one of the best and most unusual selections of illustrated materials this reviewer has ever seen... He elucidates the cluster ideas of both melodrama and modernity with uncommon good sense and clarity. Highly recommended. -- T. Lindvall Choice A fluent, precise, and excellently historicized account of the interaction between early narrative film and the processes of industrial modernization. Modernism/Modernity Singer's excellent monography Melodrama and Modernity operates firmly within this historiographic field. -- Melanie Nash Cinema and Its Context

• Introduction 1. Meanings of Modernity 2. Meanings of Melodrama 3. Sensationalism and the World of Urban Modernity 4. Making Sense of the Modernity Thesis 5. Melodrama and the Consequences of Capitalism 6. Ten-Twenty-Thirty Melodrama: Boom and Bust 7. "Child of Commerce! Bastard of Art!": Early Film Melodrama 8. Power and Peril in the Serial-Queen Melodrama 9. Marketing Melodrama: Serials and Intertextuality Conclusion