In Between: British and American Melodrama and Modernity

Abstract

This essay assesses the current state of scholarship on British and American melodrama and introduces the cluster of articles on that topic that follow. It suggests that recent advances in the field have made evident the trans-cultural, trans-medial and reproductive nature of melodrama as an art, re-focusing critical attention on melodrama's performance, production and formal evolution not within but among, and by movement between, the different cultures, media, creators, audiences, forms and works it involved. Drawing attention to British and American melodrama's critical role in this vast, largely unrecovered history of relational, migrational and reiterative creation, and noting the immediate challenges such a history presents to critical understanding and study, the essay describes the manner in which each of the cluster's articles responds to those new challenges and the ways in which, both individually and as a group, they have begun to lend that history more clarity.