About the Author

Kathleen McHugh is associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of several books, including American Domesticity: From How-To Manual to Hollywood Melodrama (Oxford, 1999). Nancy Abelmann is associate professor of anthropology and East Asian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is author of several books, most recently The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Class, and Talk in Contemporary South Korea (University of Hawai'i Press, 2003).

Reviews

Just when South Korean cinema has grabbed the global spotlight as the most successful non-Hollywood cinema, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama opens our eyes to its history. And when melodrama itself is being rethought as a historically and culturally varied mode, this volume 'gets us out of the USA, ' as one critic puts it, and enables us to understand melodrama as transnationally produced but always already locally specific."--Chris Berry "Goldsmiths College, University of London"

Overall South Korean Golden Age Melodrama offers insightful and useful information hardly known to scholars, Western as well as Korean. This book significantly contributes to Korean cinema studies. Genre and melodrama as well as gender studies."-- "Quarterly Review of Film & Video"

South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema, jointly edited by a film studies scholar and an anthropologist specialized in Korea, is a significant step towards the recognition of South Korea Golden Age Melodrama outside of its home country. It not only introduces many of the then popular and influential movies, it provides the reader with a good context in film studies and Korean social (and cinema) history. The volume is moreover impeccably edited and possesses sufficient scope in subject matter to be attractive to readers with diverse interests. If you are interested in melodrama, Korean social history, cross-cultural studies or related subjects, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema should be on your shelves."-- "Acta Koreana"

This collection is a provocative read. The authors explore an interesting period of Korean cinematic history that is informative and little know by Americans."-- "Korean Quarterly"