The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess
R 1,662
or 4 x payments of R415.50 with
Availability: Currently in Stock
Delivery: 10-20 working days
The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess
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.