The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac Henry James Melodrama and the Mode of Excess

About this book

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.