An edition of The melodramatic imagination (1976)
The melodramatic imagination
Balzac, Henry James, melodrama, and the mode of excess
By Peter Brooks
Publish Date
1976
Publisher
Yale University Press
Language
eng
Pages
235
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)
Times: 19th century