Coronation Street: Infinite Drama and British Reality

Gerlinde Frey-Vor

Coronation Street: Infinite Drama and British Reality. An Analysis of Soap Opera as Narrative and Dramatic Continuum

ISBN 978-3-922031-59-8, ISBN 3-922031-59-5, 180 S., kt., € 19,50 (1991)

(Horizonte - Studien zu Texten und Ideen der europäischen Moderne, Bd. 5)

On British television the soap opera, or continuous longrunning serial, became established thirty years ago through Coronation Street. In 1961 the whole of Britain could for the first time receive the serial set in a Mancunian working-class district. Ever since it can be followed several times a week on the commercial channel ITV.

Coronation Street: Infinite Drama and British Reality investigates the narrative und dramatic structures of a longrunning continuous serial and their interaction with social reality, with cultural conventions and a changing broadcasting system in Great Britain. A close-analysis of two episodes on the Ken and Deirdre Barlow marriage crisis, a pivotal event in the serial during the 1980s, is based on a detailed television transcript. One of the book's underlying assumptions is that Coronation Street which until today is made by the production company Granada, due to cultural factors brought about a variation of the up to then mainly American soap opera form. Later other British soap operas and the German serial Lindenstraße built on that model. In the United States research on the Soap Opera is among the earliest research on the audiovisual media. But the increasingly international significance of the genre has brought about new impetus for researchers in different countries. The book starts with an overview of the main strands of research in this field.

Pressestimme

"Gerade in einer Diskussionssituation, in der Medienprodukte immer mehr unter dem Gesichtspunkt ihrer spezifischen Beitrags zur 'Kultur' von Gesellschaften diskutiert werden, ist dieses Buch informativ und anregend."

Hans Dieter Erlinger, MEDIENwissenschaft 10.3 (1993)