During the last two decades of the nineteenth century the Dutch drama, which had lapsed into astate of somnolence since the glorious days of VondeI, suddenly awoke to vigorous life. Not only did gifted dramatists appear, but talented directors, actors, and actresses brought new splendor to the theatre. Yet this brilliant flame did not burst forth in a vacuum, and to appre ciate the quality of its light, it must be viewed against the back ground of its origins in the European drama. After the middle of the century the emphasis in literary creation had shifted from a subjective, emotional point of view to a more objective and rationalistic attitude. If this seems only a roundabout way of saying that Romanticism yielded its dominance to Realism and Naturalism, the conc1usion is justified, but we should not yield too readily to the pseudo-scientific mania which urges us to force literature into a genus and species type of c1assification. It is customary to say that in the eighties and nineties, Nat uralism won a decisive victory over Romanticism and drove the partisans of the older movement from the field. At first glance this does, indeed, appear to be true. Hugo yields to Zola, Pushkin to Tolstoi, Tieck to Hauptmann. It is all quite simple.

Herman Heijermans (1864-1924) was convinced that he lived in an "overgangs 1 tijdperk," a transitional period. As a young man in the eighteen nineties, he rejected those values and life styles which he felt belonged to the past period dominated by the bourgeoisie, and sought out situations and a profession which would attune him to the future when, he hoped, the proletariat would 2 be in power. He left the conservative business milieu of Rotterdam in 1892 and went to Amsterdam- then teeming with radical ideas. At first, Heijermans was attracted to a group of poets, de tachtigers, who were claiming to have enlivened the stale tradition of Dutch poetry by discovering language and beauty in a totally new way; but soon he felt them to be elitist. Then, in 1895, he became a member of the newly founded Dutch Social Democratic Workers Party. He alienated himself from the literary circles by claiming that art should be socialistic and by rejecting the class separation between artists and workers. He felt himself to be one with the proletariat and, through them, with "The New Life" and "The New Humanity. " Stimulated by the ongoing theater revival, which he interpreted as an attempt to challenge the bourgeois smugness and moral self-righteousness, he had started to write plays before becoming interested in the Socialist Party.

Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.

International in scope, this book is designed to be the pre-eminent reference work on the English-speaking theatre in the twentieth century. Arranged alphabetically, it consists of some 2500 entries written by 280 contributors from 20 countries which include not only top-level experts, but, uniquely, leading professionals from the world of theatre. A fascinating resource for anyone interested in theatre, it includes: - Overviews of major concepts, topics and issues; - Surveys of theatre institutions, countries, and genres; - Biographical entries on key performers, playwrights, directors, designers, choreographers and composers; - Articles by leading professionals on crafts, skills and disciplines including acting, design, directing, lighting, sound and voice.

The Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture is an extensively updated revision of the very successful Companion to Jewish Culture published in 1989 and has now been updated throughout. Experts from all over the world contribute entries ranging from 200 to 1000 words broadly, covering the humanities, arts, social sciences, sport and popular culture, and 5000-word essays contextualize the shorter entries, and provide overviews to aspects of culture in the Jewish world. Ideal for student and general readers, the articles and biographies have been written by scholars and academics, musicians, artists and writers, and the book now contains up-to-date bibliographies, suggestions for further reading, comprehensive cross referencing, and a full index. This is a resource, no student of Jewish history will want to go without.