The Melodramatic Imagination

Download or read book The Melodramatic Imagination written by Peter Brooks and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.