This pathbreaking work analyzes melodrama as not merely a theatrical genre but as a behavioral paradigm of the nineteenth century, manifest in the theater, in literature, and in society.

With its familial narratives, depictions of bodily torture, scenes of criminal conduct, expressions of highly charged emotion, and simple themes of good and evil, the melodramatic mode reaffirmed the familial, hierarchical, and public grounds for ethical behavior and identity that characterized eighteenth-century models of social exchange and organization.

In these enactments, Radicals and Tories, paupers and newsmen, ladies and prostitutes, and men of letters responded to the effects of a consolidating market culture, especially the emergence of bureaucratic procedures of rationalization, classification, and professionalization.