Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama: Caravaggio, Puccini, Contemporary Cinema [Paperback]

Offering queer analyses of paintings by Caravaggio and Puccini and films by ?zpetek, Amelio, and Grimaldi, Champagne argues that Italian masculinity has often been articulated through melodrama. Wide in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, this much-needed study shows the vital role of affect for both Italian history and masculinity studies.Introduction: Italian Masculinity and Melodrama 1. Caravaggio and the Melodramatic Sensibility 2. Caravaggio's Melodramatic Male Bodies 3. Tosca and Social Melodrama 4. Puccini's Sparrow: Longing and La Rondine 5. "Normality . . . what an ugly word!": Contemporary Queer Melodrama 6. ?zpetek's Queer Cinema Conclusion

Champagne's book offers a different perspective on questions of identity and difference through his focus on the queer melodramatic. He links the music (melos) of melodrama to theatrics as expressed through his discussions of theater, lyric opera, film, and painting. While cinema has been a focus of critical writing on gender and sexuality, especially in relation to women, opera and painting have been considered separately and differently. Now, Champagne's book brings these art forms into dialogue about bodies, especially, but not exclusively, masculine bodies. The book, through these exemplary figures and forms from different moments in time, offers a historical perspective on masculinity and melodrama. - Marcia Landy, Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Champagne does an excellent job of returning to previous explored areas of Italian masculinity and melodrama to present new ways of seeing what earlier scholars have either ignored or overlooked in some of the most studied works of art. He devises a trajectory that extends his argument over media, time and place, and in the process helps us to see beyond the studies that he builds upon, and which he skillfully transcends. The result establishes Italian Masculinity as Quel“7