Since the debut of These Are My Children in 1949, the daytime television soap opera has been foundational to the history of the medium as an economic, creative, technological, social, and cultural institution. In Her Stories, Elana Levine draws on archival research and her experience as a longtime soap fan to provide an in-depth history of the daytime television soap opera as a uniquely gendered cultural form and a central force in the economic and social influence of network television. Closely observing the production, promotion, reception, and narrative strategies of the soaps, Levine examines two intersecting developments: the role soap operas have played in shaping cultural understandings of gender and the rise and fall of broadcast network television as a culture industry. In so doing, she foregrounds how soap operas have revealed changing conceptions of gender and femininity as imagined by and reflected on the television screen.
ISBN-13: 9781478008019
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 02-25-2020
Pages: 398
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.89(d)
Series: Console-Ing Passions
Elana Levine is Professor of Media, Cinema and Digital Studies in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television, also published by Duke University Press; editor of Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century; and coauthor of Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status.
What People are Saying About This
Michele Hilmes
“Her Stories is the definitive account of a sphere of televisual expression long overlooked and too often maligned, told clearly and compellingly by an accomplished historian and committed viewer whose research has left few stones unturned. A major contribution to our understanding of American television and its intersection with women's lives, traced across more than seven decades.”
TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television - Lynn Spigel
“Her Stories offers an important history of American soap operas, from the genre's transition from radio to television in the 1950s and its heyday in the classic network era to its diminished significance in the age of streaming. Elana Levine's rich industrial history smartly mines scripts, trade journals, and production notes, and sponsors' memos. Most significantly, it places these developments into the larger context of women's everyday lives and the changing politics of gender.”
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Part I. The New TV Soap: Late 1940s to Early 1960s
1. Serials in Transition: From Radio to Television 19
2. Daytime Therapy: Help and Healing in the Postwar Soap 44
Part II. The Classic Network Era: Mid-1960s to Late 1980s
3. Building Network Power: The Broadcasting Business and the Craft of Soap Opera 73
4. Turning to Relevance: Social Issue Storytelling 106
5. Love in the Afternoon: The Fracturing Fantasies of the Soap Boom 153
Part III. A Post-Network Age: Late 1980s to 2010s
6. Struggles for Survival: Stagnation and Innovation 199
7. Reckoning with the Past: Reimagining Characters and Stories 236
8. Can Her Stories Go On? Soap Opera in a Digital Age 280
Notes 299
Bibliography 357
Index 369
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