Title: The melodramatic imagination
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."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: History and criticism, Melodrama, Criticism and interpretation, Romanticism, Fiction, Imagination, Creation (literary, artistic, etc.), Literature, modern, history and criticism, Literaire esthetiek, Melodrama's, Romantiek
People: Henry James (1843-1916), Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)
Time periods: 19th century