Melodrama as Provocateur showcases the final project of influential film scholar Linda Williams, along with responses to her work by a diverse collection of scholars. Together, these writings dig into the past, present, and future of melodrama’s prominence in contemporary media and politics.
As one of the most influential contemporary film scholars, Linda Williams brought her critical feminist lens to some of society’s most maligned and underappreciated film genres. Melodrama as Provocateur showcases what was to be Williamss last project in which, insisting on melodrama as a cross-generic, cross-media mode, she investigates the divergence between French and American attitudes to film melodrama. A diverse group of scholars respond to her provocations, rethinking melodrama’s transnational, transmedia histories and potential futures. Their contributions examine how melodrama became, as Williams argues, the default mode of contemporary media, and demonstrate how it plays an increasingly powerful role in public discourse and political rhetoric today.
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.
“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
