Love and Marriage Across Social Classes in American Cinema, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2017

Langue : Anglais

Auteur : Sharot Stephen

Couverture de l’ouvrage Love and Marriage Across Social Classes in American Cinema

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Biographie
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This book is the first comprehensive and systematic study of cross-class romance films throughout the history of American cinema. It provides vivid discussions of these romantic films, analyses their normative patterns and thematic concerns, traces how they were shaped by inequalities of gender and class in American society, and explains why they were especially popular from World War I through the roaring twenties and the Great Depression. In the vast majority of cross-class romance films the female is poor or from the working class, the male is wealthy or from the upper class, and the romance ends successfully in marriage or the promise of marriage.

Preface.- 1. Love, Marriage and Class.- 2. Before the Movies: The Cross-Class Romance in Fiction.- 3. From Attraction and the One-Reeler to the Feature.- 4. Sexual Exploitation and Class Conflict.- 5. Consumerism and Ethnicity.- 6. The Cross-Class Romance in the Depression.- 7. Male Seducers and Female Gold-Diggers.- 8. The End of the Golden Era and After.

Stephen Sharot (D.Phil. Oxford) is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research focuses on representations of class and their relationships to gender in popular cinema. He is the author of five books and numerous articles in the sociology of religion.

First comprehensive and systematic historical survey of American films centering on cross-class romance

Outlines in detail the most important narrative patterns and thematic concerns of cross-class romance films, emphasizing both continuities and changes in these patterns and concerns over the decades

Contextualizes the films with reference to the structure and operations of the American film industry, their reception, the personas of the stars who appeared in them, and the social realities of working life, dating, and marriage in American society