num_pages: 251
description: 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.
language: English
title: The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess
titlecomplete: The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess
genres: Literature, History, Essays, Psychoanalysis, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Theatre
ratings_count: 76
publisher: Yale University Press