Lajos Egri examines a play from the inside out starting with the heart of any drama: its characters. For it is people - their private natures and their inter-relationships - that move a story and give it life. All good dramatic writing depends upon an understanding of human motives. Why do people act as they do? What forces transform a coward into a hero a hero into a coward? What is it that Romeo does early in Shakespeare's play that makes his later suicide seem inevitable? Why must Nora leave her husband at the end of A Doll's House? These are a few of the fascinating problems which Egri analyzes. He shows how it is essential for the author to have a basic premise - a thesis demonstrated in terms of human behaviour - and to develop his dramatic conflict on the basis of that behaviour. Premise character conflict: this is Egri's ABC. His book is a direct jargon-free approach to the problem of achieving truth in a literary creation.
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Product details
- Paperback | 320 pages
- 140 x 214 x 20mm | 261g
- 17 May 2004
- SIMON & SCHUSTER
- TOUCHSTONE
- New York United States
- English
- 0671213326
- 9780671213329
- 6587