This book examines melodramatic impulses in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, as well as the series' film adaptations and fan-authored texts. Attention to conventions such as crying, victimization, and happy endings in the context of the Twilight-Jane Eyre relationship reveals melodrama as an empowering mode of communication for girls. Although melodrama has saturated popular culture since the nineteenth century, its expression in texts for, about, and by girls has been remarkably under theorized. By defining melodrama, however, through its Victorian lineages, Katie Kapurch recognizes melodrama's aesthetic form and rhetorical function in contemporary girl culture while also demonstrating its legacy since the nineteenth century. Informed by feminist theories of literature and film, Kapurch shows how melodrama is worthy of serious consideration since the mode critiques limiting social constructions of postfeminist girlhood and, at the same time, enhances intimacy between girls—both characters and readers.

This edited collection offers undergraduate Literature instructors a guide to the pedagogy and teaching of Victorian literature in liberal arts classrooms. With numerous essays focused on thematic course design, this volume reflects the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the literature classroom. A section on genre provides suggestions on approaching individual works and discussing their influence on production of texts. Sections on digital humanities and “out of the classroom” approaches to Victorian literature reflect current practices and developing trends. The concluding section offers three different versions of an “ideal” course, each of which shows how thematic, disciplinary, genre, and technological strands may be woven together in meaningful ways. Professors of introductory literature courses aimed at non-English majors to advanced seminars for majors will find accessible and innovative course ideas supplemented with a variety of versatile teaching materials, including syllabi, assignments, and in-class activities.

This collaborative History aims to become the standard work on Victorian literature for the twenty-first century. Well-known scholars introduce readers to their particular fields, discuss influential critical debates and offer illuminating contextual detail to situate authors and works in their wider cultural and historical contexts. Sections on publishing and readership and a chronological survey of major literary developments between 1837 and 1901, are followed by essays on topics including sexuality, sensation, cityscapes, melodrama, epic and economics. Victorian writing is placed in its complex relation to the Empire, Europe and America, as well as to Britain's component nations. The final chapters consider how Victorian literature, and the period as a whole, influenced twentieth-century writers. Original, lucid and stimulating, each chapter is an important contribution to Victorian literary studies. Together, the contributors create an engaging discussion of the ways in which the Victorians saw themselves and of how their influence has persisted.

A lively and accessible account of the most popular form of nineteenth-century English theatre, and its continuing influence today.

In 1945, a year when American crime films were apparently moving out on to the streets of contemporary Los Angeles and New York, one reviewer noted the emergence of a 'cycle of mystery and horror pictures placed in the gaslight era of the turn of the century.' For another critic, it seemed that for Hollywood there was 'no world of today save the world of London by gaslight'. In Gaslight Melodrama, Guy Barefoot examines the films that gave rise to such comments, and the pattern of discourse that gave rise to such films. The book's main focus is provided by 1940s Hollywood melodramas such as Gaslight, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Hangover Square. It also discusses a related cycle of British films that located murder and melodrama in Victorian or Edwardian settings, and then looks beyond cinema to the Gothic novels of the 18th century, 19th century discussions of gas lighting in street, home and theatre, and ambivalent 20th century responses to the Victorian era. Combining close analysis of particular film texts with attention to cinema's cultural context, Gaslight Melodrama provides an exploration of the ways in which the past has been the site of contested meaning, and an examination of the network of melodramatic narratives embedded within familiar and lesser-known examples of classical Hollywood cinema.

The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies gathers two dozen original essays that chart the history and current state of interdisciplinary scholarship on music in audiovisual media, focusing on four areas: history, genre and medium, analysis and criticism, and interpretation.

Focus on young adult literature - This focus on young adult literature means that this book expands scholarship specifically in this area. Focus on the Gothic for young people – Gothic texts are very popular in children’s and young adult literature, but there hasn’t been a lot of scholarship on the Gothic for adolescents. This book expands our knowledge of how the Gothic intersects with young adult literature. Includes coverage of YA fiction from the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, a range of genres that intersect with the Gothic (including historical fiction and fairy tale), as well as forms such as the short story and graphic novel.