Melodrama, Theatricality and Realism

Speaker: Jeremy Tambling

This paper explores ‘realism’ in a European context, through Goldsmith, Goethe and Balzac, as well as through George Eliot and her interest in Dutch seventeenth-century art; but it also looks at the links that the realist novel always had with drama, and with melodrama and the way that the tricks, and the excess, and the ‘theatricality’ of melodrama are inherent to realism and not separate from it; here examples will be taken from Dickens, and Dostoevsky, and Gissing.