1. Introduction; 2. Melodrama/subjectivity/ideology: Western melodrama theories and their relevance (or not) to recent Chinese cinema; 3. Symbolic representation and symbolic violence: Chinese family melodrama of the early 1980's; 4. The Goddess. Reflections on melodrama East and West; 5. History and its discontent: melodrama as historical understanding; 6. Melodrama, postmodernism and Japanese cinema; 7. Staging the subject: the melodramatisation of gender in An Actor's Revenge; 8. Insiders and outsiders: cross-cultural criticism and Japanese film melodrama; 9. Psyches, ideologies and melodrama: US and Japan; 10. Andaz; 11. The concept of evil and social order in Indian melodrama: an evolving dialectic; 12. Politics of melodrama in Indonesian cinema; 13. Power, pleasure and desire: the female body in Filipino melodrama; 14. The register of nightmare: melodrama as it (dis)appears in Australian film; 15. Overview: what is American about film study in America?