“…However, in many ways, Brooks makes melodrama acceptable to literary studies rather than rethinking literary studies via melodrama; he removes melodrama from its original ideological and theatrical contexts and, in framing characters as 'psychic signs', buries the cultural politics of melodrama's lack of interest in the psyche. 13 Brooks' work is perhaps atypical of studies of melodrama, however, which can perhaps most helpfully (though heuristically and not exclusively) be seen via three different threads: 'theatrical' studies which focus on theatre as theatre, and/or theatre history; genre studies, which include, but extend beyond, a significant body of work on the The internet is not simply broadening access to the play as print object but also to theatrical 'ephemera' -not in fact ephemeral to scholars' interest in the material conditions and cultural production of nineteenth-century melodrama. …”