The invention of melodrama: fold, resentment and translation in Juan Moreira

Abstract

This article analyzes the hypotheses around the origin of melodrama and its projection towards the end of the 19th century and the 20th century. As heir to the cultural impact of the French Revolution and Italian opera, melodrama knew how to link modern tragedy with procedures anchored in other genres such as hyperbole, climax, grotesque and imperatives for justice and human suffering. It is about especially highlighting the link between melodrama and the development of techné as a support from which it has been projected: serials, radio drama and cinema. The work also analyzes the series of aesthetic formations that have taken as a source the figure of Juan Moreira as a prominent character of the nineteenth-century popular culture of Argentina, and an unequivocal expression of the violence of the State towards the subaltern.