Exploring the relationship between dramatic language and its theatrical aspects, Reading Modern Drama provides an accessible entry point for general readers and academics into the world of contemporary theatre scholarship. This collection promotes the use of diverse perspectives and critical methods to explore the common theme of language as well as the continued relevance of modern drama in our lives. Reading Modern Drama offers provocative close readings of both canonical and lesser-known plays, from Hedda Gabler to e.e. cummings' Him. Taken together, these essays enter into an ongoing, fruitful debate about the terms 'modern' and 'drama' and build a much-needed bridge between literary studies and performance studies.

This book tells the story of modern drama through its seminal, groundbreaking plays and performances, and the artistic diversity that these represent. Exploring the new note of artistic hostility between dramatists and their audience, Shepherd-Barr draws on a range of theories and performances to reveal what makes modern drama 'modern'.

This collection of essays, originally published over the last forty years in the journal Modern Drama, explores the drama of four of the most influential European proponents of modernism in the European Drama: Ibsen, Strandberg, Pirandello and Beckett.

The Myth of Identity in Modern Drama is the first book-length study on existential authenticity and its relation to ontological embodiment treated via analyses of characters of modern drama. Furthermore, it offers new methods of exploring characters and characterization and new ways of thinking about identity. Through its investigations of the plays of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Jean-Paul Sartre, the book shows that the study of embodiment will allow for a new method of analyzing characters and how they form, or attempt to form, ever-changing identities.

The Modern Drama, as all modern literature, mirrors the complex struggle of life... -Emma Goldman, in the Foreword With her reputation as a political radical, it is often forgotten that much of Emma Goldman's activism was rooted in the arts. As a member of The Progressive Stage Society, a founding force in the experimental theater movement, and through her work as a theatrical manager herself, she moved in quite artistic circles. And in these 1914 essays, adapted from a lecture series, she turned her passionate and philosophical eye on the stage, blending social commentary and theatrical criticism as she dissects: Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House and An Enemy of the People August Strindberg's Miss Julie and Comrades Edmond Rostand's Chantecler George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession and Major Barbara William Butler Yeats's Where There Is Nothing Anton Chekhov's The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard Leonid Andreyev's King Hunger and others from Scandinavia, Germany, France, England, Ireland, and Russia who were the "social iconoclasts" of her time... and ours. Also available from Cosimo Classics: Anarchism and Other Essays, by Emma Goldman. Anarchist and feminist EMMA GOLDMAN (1869-1940) is one of the towering figures in global radicalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Lithuania, she emigrated to the United States as a teenager, was deported in 1919 for her criticism of the U.S. military draft in World War I, and died in Toronto after a globetrotting life. An early advocate of birth control, women's rights, and workers unions, she was an important and influential figure in such far-flung geopolitical events as the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. Amongher many books are My Disillusionment in Russia (1925) and Living My Life (1931).