Improving Passions: Sentimental Aesthetics and American Film

by Charles Burnetts

Examining eighteenth century ‘moral sense’ philosophy as a neglected but important intellectual area for film theory, Improving Passions is an innovative exploration of the sentimental tradition as both theatrical genre and cultural logic.

192 pages, Hardcover

Published July 4, 2017

Reviews

[matti · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was required reading for a film class I’m taking & I thoroughly enjoyed its musings on how sentimentality in film plays upon melodrama & its complicated relationship with class-dynamics.