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.
- Author
- Peter Brooks
- Format
- paperback
- Pages
- 251
- Publisher
- Yale University Press
- Language
- english
- ISBN
- 9780300065534
- Genres
- theory, theatre
- Release date
- 1995
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