Elana Levine, Duke University Press, 2020

Daytime viewing staples for seven decades, soap operas hold an important place in television history. Elana Levine, a professor of English in the College of Letters & Science, is a longtime soap opera fan who looks at the genre through two connected lenses: the role soaps have played in shaping cultural understandings of gender, as well as the rise and fall of network television’s influence on pop culture. Levine’s book examines the legacy of soaps as an economic, creative, technological, social and cultural institution.