I've read various sections of this, a fascinating reference book. I started with 'Global Neighbours? by Stephen Crofts, because it is an Australian soap that was very popular in Britain. I swear I have never watched an episode myself. This essay opens with: 'An irresistible epigraph from Jerry Hall, when she was the taller half of Mick Jagger, speaking on the Clive James Show in the United Kingdom on New Years Eve, December 31, 1989: "Before I saw Neighbours, I didn't know there was an Australia." '
Now, some can appreciate the irony in this, now that Jerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch are engaged.
Another standout essay is: 'The end of civilization as we knew it, Chances* and the postrealist soap opera' by Ien Ang and Jon Stratton 'Chances* and the postrealist soap opera. Chances problematizes the traditional soap's stress on the moral consensus of community by privileging 'radical excess': that which is excessive to, and therefore is generally excluded from the prevailing moral order of soap opera. This shift forms the basis of what we will call soap opera POSTREALISM.'
The collective essays cover soap operas around the world.