Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Introduction; Film Melodrama in Latin America: A Short History; Darlene J. Sadlier; 1. Gilberto Perez; Melodrama of the Spirited Woman: Aventurera; 2. Luisela Alvaray; Melodrama and the Emergence of Venezuelan Cinema; 3. Paula Felix-Didier and Andres Levinson; The Building of a Nation: La guerra gaucha as Historical Melodrama; 4. Cid Vasconcelos; Women as Civilizers in 1940s Brazilian Cinema: Between Passion and the Nation; 5. Ismail Xavier; The Humiliation of the Father: Melodrama and Cinema Novo's Critique of Conservative Modernization; 6. Darlene J. Sadlier; Nelson Pereira dos Santos'Cinema de lagrimas; 7. Marvin D'Lugo; Luis Alcoriza or a Certain Anti-Melodramatic Tendency in Mexican Cinema; 8. Mariana Baltar; Weeping Reality: Melodramatic Imagination in Contemporary Brazilian Documentaries; 9. Catherine L. Benamou; Televisual Melodrama in an Era of Transnational Migration: Exporting the Folkloric Nation, Harvesting the Melancholic-Sublime; Notes on Contributors

Promotional Information

The first book to consider cinematic and televisual melodrama in a broad Latin American and U.S. Latino context

About the Author

Darlene J. Sadlier is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University and the author of Nelson Pereira dos Santos and, most recently, Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present.

Reviews

 "Latin American Melodrama provides long-awaited and much needed analyses of a genre which ... is difficult to define. . . . Sadlier has succeeded in assembling an anthology that is both strongly researched and diverse in its focus. . . . A consistently powerful study of Latin American melodrama."--Studies in Latin American Popular Culture

"Is effective in providing a clear analysis of the use of melodrama in building national narratives while also highlighting the ironic transnational realities of film and telenovelas."--Hispania

"Welcome and long overdue addition to an established field of study."--Luso-Brazilian Review