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The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess

In this lucid and fascinating book, Peter Brooks argues that melodrama is a crucial mode of expression in modern literature. After studying stage melodrama as a dominant popular form in the nineteenth century, he moves on to Balzac and Henry James to show how these "realist" novelists created fiction using the rhetoric and excess of melodrama — in particular its secularized conflicts of good and evil, salvation and damnation. The Melodramatic Imagination has become a classic work for understanding theater, fiction, and film.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 251
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780300065534
  • Genres
  • theory, theatre
  • Release date
  • 1995