The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk and Class in Contemporary South Korea

Through the lives and narratives of eight women, The Melodrama of Mobility chronicles South Korea’s experience of dizzyingly rapid development. Nancy Abelmann captures the mood, feeling, and language of a generation and an era while providing a rare window on the personal and social struggles of South Korean modernity. Drawing also from television soap operas and films, she argues that a melodramatic sensibility speaks to South Korea’s transformation because it preserves the tension and ambivalence of daily life in unsettled times.