0 a story, play, or film in which the characters show stronger emotions than real people usually do: --
mainly UK The car's hardly damaged - there's no need to make a melodrama out of it (= make the situation more important than it is).
a television melodrama
1 a play or style of acting in which the characters behave and show emotion in a more noticeable way than real people usually do --
But he also, like the anti-poor law cartoonists of the 1830s and 1840s, responds to a tradition of radical melodrama.
Yet as entertaining and quotable as all the melodrama is, the dry physiological voice is in the end more radical.
Finally, this move is also inspired by some recent accounts of melodrama by anthropologists.
Moreover, the puppet show presents an interesting and important contrast with the theatrical genre of melodrama.
Several films were in fact made of the most popular melodramas.
Deploying the common rhetoric of melodrama, the bill's opponents insisted that women were fragile creatures, the easy prey of libertines and seducers.
A hybrid of various strains within nineteenth-century fiction, the sensation genre reflects the influence of stage melodrama and prefigures crime and detective fiction.
Besides melodrama and dime-store romance, the novel is studded with nuggets of politically instructive detail.
