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.
- ISBN10 0300020015
- ISBN13 9780300020014
- Publish Date September 1976
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 18 January 1994
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Yale University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 256
- Language English