Product Description: The romantic comedy has long been regarded as an inferior film genre by critics and scholars alike, accused of maintaining a strict narrative formula which is considered superficial and highly predictable. However, the genre has resisted the negative scholarly and critical comments and for the last three decades the steady increase in the numbers of romantic comedies position the genre among the most popular ones in the globally dominant Hollywood film industry...read more

Product Description: The most up-to-date study of the Hollywood romantic comedy film,from the development of sound to the twenty-first century, thisbook examines the history and conventions of the genre and surveysthe controversies arising from the critical responses to thesefilms...read more

Product Description: Romantic comedy is an enduringly popular genre which has maintained its appeal by constantly evolving, from the screwball comedy to the recent emergence of the bromance. Romantic Comedy examines the history of the genre, considering the social and cultural context for key developments in new genre cycles...read more

As recent history continues to show, France and the United states enjoy a love-hate relationship. Expressions of admiration and dismissal of one culture by the other are usually based on superficial judgments derived from well-worn clichés that do little more than perpetuate perceived and real differences between the two societies. Those who study these differences inevitably examine them through their own cultural peculiarities. Marianne and the Puritan attempts to draw these various analyses together by contrasting the different ways each culture constructs the romantic couple through U.S. and French popular cinema. David I. Grossvogel's broad sweeping, comparative, and interdisciplinary study is conducted with great elegance and erudition. It is a must for film studies, literary criticism, francophone studies, art history, and cultural sociology and anthropology.

Looks at the 'new' Depression-era woman and how she led to the development of a movie genre characterized by witty, self-assured, and stubborn women portrayed by such actresses as Claudette Colbert, Katharine Hepburn, and Jean Arthur (view table of contents)

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This study of the romantic comedies of the 1930s and 1940s examines individual films, the director's oeuvre, and the performers most closely associated with romantic comedy

An excursion through the world of the screen comedies about love, marriage, and everyday life that were produced in the thirties and early forties