In this groundbreaking investigation into the nature and meanings of melodrama in American culture between 1880 and 1920, Ben Singer offers a challenging new reevaluation of early American cinema and the era that spawned it. Singer looks back to the sensational or "blood and thunder" melodramas (e.g., The Perils of Pauline, The Hazards of Helen, etc.) and uncovers a fundamenta...(展开全部)

This text argues that melodrama is a crucial mode of expression in modern literature. After studying stage melodrama as a dominant popular form in the 1800s, the author looks at Balzac and Henry James, to show how these "realist" novelists created fiction using rhetoric and excess of melodrama.

This text argues that melodrama is a crucial mode of expression in modern literature. After studying stage melodrama as a dominant popular form in the 1800s, the author looks at Balzac and Henry James, to show how these "realist" novelists created fiction using rhetoric and excess of melodrama.

The history of the book in 19th Century Japan follows an uneven course that resists the simple chronology often used to mark a divide between pre-modern and modern literary history. By examining the obscured histories of publication, circulation, and reception of widely consumed literary works from late Edo to the early Meiji period, Jonathan Zwicker traces a genealogy of the l...(展开全部)