The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess / Edition 2

by Peter Brooks

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300065534
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	11/29/1995
Edition description:	Revised Edition
Pages:	251
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.50(h) x (d)