About the Book:Like their Hollywood counterparts, Latin American film and TV melodramas have always been popular and highly profitable. The first of its kind, this anthology engages in a serious study of the aesthetics and cultural implications of Latin American melodramas. Written by some of the major figures in Latin American film scholarship, the studies range across seventy years of movies and television within a transnational context, focusing specifically on the period known as the “Golden Age” of melodrama, the impact of classic melodrama on later forms, and more contemporary forms of melodrama. An introductory essay examines current critical and theoretical debates on melodrama and places the essays within the context of Latin American film and media scholarship.Contributors are Luisela Alvaray, Mariana Baltar, Catherine L. Benamou, Marvin DLugo, Paula Flix-Didier, Andrs Levinson, Gilberto Perez, Darlene J. Sadlier, Cid Vasconcelos, and Ismail Xavier.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