The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess by Peter Brooks

I have no interest in Balzac, and even less so in Henry James, but this book is referenced absolutely everywhere, so I felt I had to check it out, and find out what in the world someone as unbearably dull as Henry James can possibly have in common with the ridiculous excess of melodrama. I didn't actually read the parts about Balzac and James (they take up very little of the book), and Peter Brooks spends most of the book theorising melodrama as a genre as opposed to tragedy and comedy and its relation to its historical moment. He argues very convincingly that melodrama is a vital expression of the modern consciousness and that is still with us today. Especially interesting (for me) was his linking of melodrama with psychology as a science. However, the text is at times very dense and theoretical and can be hard to read (at least for me). It is also a fairly old critical study (1976) and therefore tend to generalise and present complex theories without referring to where they come from. In one part he writes that tragedy entails a sacrifice and a 'communal partaking of the sacred body' (which was interesting to me for an essay I'm working on), but does not explain where this theory of tragedy comes from. Maybe he takes it for common knowledge (which I certainly do not share) that everybody will know who theorised tragedy this way. But in general, a very interesting study, and you certainly don't have to give a fuck about Henry James to read it.