Overview
Amid the hundreds of 'how-to' books that have appeared in recent years, there have been very few which attempted to analyze the mysteries of play-construction. This book does just that.
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.
- | Author: Lajos Egri
- | Publisher: Simon & Schuster
- | Publication Date: May 17, 2004
- | Number of Pages:
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- | Binding: Paperback / softback
- | ISBN-13: 9780671213329
- | ISBN-10: 0671213326