Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Robinson follows the rigid conventions of historical melodrama. The land he describes contains no skinny women or frail men: all sexual union is of seismic intensity, heroes rise to wealth and power but pay with fearsome personal tragedy. Once these are accepted-and they are not really much harder to swallow than Moliere's convention that all husbands are cuckolds, or Homer's that all heroes above the rank of lieutenant colonel enjoy godly guidance -Robinson's book is entertaining enough. Obviously the author, who wrote a much-admired exegesis of Finnegans Wake (with Joseph Campbell...
This is more than melodrama, Translator Graves easily persuades the reader. Alarcon, the firebrand grown conservative, still is a mocker. His gentle irony is aimed partly at the lofty aspirations of youth, and also, less obviously, at the easy com promises of age. The author's characters, particularly those that are, in part, self-caricatures, are drawn with accuracy and wit. Alarcón's description of a selfconscious, self-elected young genius shows why his book is worth Graves's trouble and the reader's time: "A young man, pale and gloomy, who avoids mankind...
...penny, held a somber parley with their two other brothers, Run Ji and Run Di. At issue: whether or not to sell their last remaining family possession, a dilapidated theater. They decided to sell their house instead and live in the theater, managed to put together a cumbersome stage melodrama called Man from Shensi, which inexplicably became a hit. One reason: the first night, the hero leaped into the air, fell through rotten floor boards. The audience laughed so hard that the brothers made the crash part of the play...
...Democrat Paul Douglas, in his distress over the supposed inadequacies of the bill, turned for solace to T. S. Eliot's The Hollow Men: "This is the way the world ends-Not with a bang but a whimper." And Pennsylvania's Democratic Joe Clark outdid all the melodrama by telling how he had surrendered his "sword" to the South's chief strategist, Richard Russell of Georgia. "Surely," cried Joe Clark, "the roles of Grant and Lee at Appomattox have been reversed." And then Clark wound up with a touching recital of four stanzas from The Battle Hymn...
This excellent first nov.el is remarkable not only for the virtues it possesses but for the faults it lacks. There is little of the melodrama customary in books about adolescence. There is no Wolfeian confluence of the literary and the pituitary-the youthful poet growing an inch a month on a diet of a book a day. The author is no more sentimental or romantic about his hero than Stephen Crane was about the protagonist of The Red Badge of Courage. The books are similar in kind and (to a considerable extent) in quality: Author Crane's young soldier...