The melodramatic imagination: Balzac, Henry James, melodrama, and the mode of excess

By Peter Brooks

Book Overview

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: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300020015
• ISBN13: 9780300020014
• Release Date: January 1976
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.