Linda Williams (1946–2025) was Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She authored and edited several books, including Screening Sex and Playing the Race Card. She received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies.

Christine Gledhill is Visiting Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Leeds.

Laura Horak is Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University.

Elisabeth R. Anker is Professor of American Studies and Political Science and Director of Film Studies at The George Washington University.

Introduction / Christine Gledhill, Laura Horak, and Elisabeth R. Ander 1
Part I. Provocations
1. The Fortunes of Melodrama in France and America; or, Why Melodrama Is Still Important / Linda Williams 15
Part II. Refiguring Melodrama’s Histories as Transnational/Transmedial Form
2. On Shifting Ground: Melodrama’s Transcultural, Transmedial, and Transhistorical Genesis / Matthew Buckley 65
3. Hollywood’s Export to the World: Melodramas of Colonial Conquest / Jane M. Gaines 81
4. Feeling Our Way: Melodrama and Emotional Engagement / E. Deidre Pribram 101
5. Strip Thinking: Forms of Intermittent Pictorialization / Carolyn Williams 119
6. “And We Wept, Precious”: Motion Capture and Melodrama / Carla Marcantonio 137
Part III. Melodrama’s Fortunes in France and America: Eighteenth to Twenty-First Century
7. Seeking Sisterhood: French Melodrama, American Cinema, and the Case of Les deux orphelines / Victoria Duckett 151
8. Searching for Melodrama in French Versus American Cinema, 1908–1912 / Richard Abel 168
9. The Lost World: Le Silence est d’or; or, French (Mis)Recognition of a MÉlodrame That Dares Not Speak Its Name / Charles-Antoine Courcoux 182
10. “Grab ’Em by the Pussy”: Donald Trump and the MAGA Melodrama / Elisabeth R. Anker 201
11. Trans Melodramas / Laura Horak 219
Part IV. Aesthetics and Politics of Emotion
12. Falling in Love and in Art: The Diva Documentary / Dolores McElroy 243
13. Melodrama as Default Mode of Popular Culture: P!nk’s Album Trustfall (2023) / Martin Shingler 260
14. Emotional Legibility: Modernity, Melodrama, and Ambivalent Gender Justice in Bombay Cinema, 1930s–1950s / Ira Bhaskar 272
15. From My Sister’s Bedside: Life and Death in the Shadow of Blossoms Shanghai / Zhang Zhen 293
Acknowledgments 311
Contributors 313
Index 317