Melodrama
The Melodramatic Imagination
Peter Brooks · Yale University Press, 1976
Argues that melodrama emerged after the French Revolution as a 'mode of excess' that dramatises moral meaning in a world where sacred authority has collapsed.
Act III
Scholarly Journals
What historians and critics argue about this era — and where to read them.
Bourgeois drama
"Tableau and Coup de Théâtre: On the Social Psychology of Diderot's Bourgeois Tragedy"
Peter Szondi · New Literary History, 1980
Reads Diderot's frozen family tableaux as a retreat into private feeling — the middle class discovering itself on stage.
Spectatorship
Absorption and Theatricality
Michael Fried · University of California Press, 1980
Though focused on painting, its theory of figures 'absorbed' and unaware of the viewer illuminates Diderot's fourth wall.
Audiences & politics
The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791
Jeffrey S. Ravel · Cornell University Press, 1999
Shows how the standing crowd in the pit became a rehearsal space for public opinion before the Revolution.
Theory
Theories of the Theatre
Marvin Carlson · Cornell University Press, 1984
The standard survey; essential chapters trace Lessing, Diderot, Schiller and Hugo dismantling neoclassical rules.