"This book aims at a dual objective: first, to analyze the formation of the Brazilian commercial television system and the emergence of a genre, the novela; and second, to establish theoretical guidelines so as to understand better the stakes of critical reflection on the upheavals occurring in tele
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vision today [...] In ten years, Brazil has succeeded in creating a national audiovisual program industry that has shown itself capable of exporting on a grand scale. The internationalization of Brazilian programs goes hand-in-hand with the attraction of a cheap, efficient mode of production. Confronted with the dual need to increase their production and lower their costs, European television channels have recently developed an interest in the novela; it copies neither the European serial nor the U.S. series, yet fits into the dynamics of serialization. This book invites the reader to consider the history of genres, the ideological and aesthetic forms that have crystallized the collective imagination and in which popular memory and national memory are always in tension." (Preface, page x-xi)
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"This ambitious, broad-ranging study of one of the world's most interesting genres laudably tries to cover the telenovela industry, its creative process, the contents of novelas, and their reception by the working class. Besides having the descriptive richness one might expect of a book-length case
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study, the work has a sophisticated and relatively thorough theoretical orientation [...] Overall this book is a very good introduction to Brazilian television and the telenovela in particular. It is also of considerable value to those interested in Bourdieu's ideas, questions of social class and audience in general, or ethnographic research about audiences in the Third World." (Book review by Joseph Straubhaar, in: Journal of Communication, Spring 1990, page 162-164)
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