'That pudgy colossus of movie melodramas': The films of Alfred Hitchcock, the melodramatic tradition, and the postwar discourse on irony

Irony is a key word in I Hitchcock criticism. Melodrama is not. This incongruity is at the heart of my dissertation.; Until relatively recently, Hitchcock's films were regarded as melodramas. Indeed, Hitchcock often characterized them as such himself. But aside from a fairly small number of books and articles dealing with Hitchcock's overt melodramas (e.g., Rebecca), the melodramatic nature of Hitchcock's films has gone all but ignored in film criticism. To some extent, this is attributable to a broader cultural shift in the meaning of melodrama, but it also attributable to a deliberate strategy on the part of Hitchcock's auteurist admirers (e.g., Robin Wood) to recast Hitchcock's melodramas as works of irony that subverted their ostensibly melodramatic plots. Whether accurate or not, this conceptualization of Hitchcock's films, exercised an enormous influence on the critical construction of the Hitchcock oeuvre.; My dissertation attempts, on the one hand, to trace the intellectual roots of the auteurists' deployment of the rhetoric of irony and, on the other, to highlight certain aspects of Hitchcock's films that Hitchcock's auteurist admirers, whether consciously or not, overlooked. In so doing. I try to show how the evolution of Hitchcock's cinema in the postwar era paralleled, in a curious fashion, the evolution of the word irony in literary critiscism.