Melodrama as Provocateur

"Williams"s Melodrama as Provocateur is a comparative history of melodrama in two societies on both sides of the Atlantic. This collection changes the way we look at contemporary fictional production and challenges the dichotomy between elite and mass culture. It argues against this academic tradition and defends the idea that melodrama is the central form of American fiction, and more broadly of democratic cultures, found in most fictional cinemas around the world."-Geneviève Sellier, coauthor of The Battle of the Sexes in French Cinema, 1930-1956

"Williams has been one of the outstanding American scholars of cinema, who has written about a whole series of important topics-race, documentary, pornography, melodrama-with a remarkable timeliness as well as insight. Melodrama as a topic continues to be of vital and expanding interest in the film and media studies field, and this team of melodrama scholars is of the highest order."-Charles Musser, Yale University