Emma Goldman's 'The Social Significance of the Modern Drama' is a groundbreaking analysis of the role that drama plays in reflecting and shaping society. Published in 1914, amidst a period of significant social and political upheaval, Goldman delves into the works of playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and August Strindberg to explore how their plays challenge traditional norms and power structures. She argues that the modern drama serves as a powerful tool for social change and liberation, drawing connections between art and political activism. Goldman's writing style is passionate and incisive, drawing on her own experiences as an anarchist and feminist to provide a unique perspective on the cultural landscape of her time. Her insights continue to resonate today, making this book a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of art, politics, and social justice.

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).

Study of several major and a few minor dramatists from Goldman's anarchist, social revolutionary viewpoint.

The Social Significance of the Modern Drama is a 1914 treatise by Emma Goldman on political implications of significant playwrights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.

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Anarchist, journalist, drama critic, advocate of birth control and free love, Emma Goldman was the most famous—and notorious—woman in the early twentieth century. This abridged version of her two-volume autobiography takes her from her birthplace in czarist Russia to the socialist enclaves of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Against a dramatic backdrop of political argument, show trials, imprisonment, and tempestuous romances, Goldman chronicles the epoch that she helped shape: the reform movements of the Progressive Era, the early years of and later disillusionment with Lenin’s Bolshevik experiment, and more. Sounding a call still heard today, Living My Life is a riveting account of political ferment and ideological turbulence. First time in Penguin Classics Condensed to half the length of Goldman's original work, this edition is accessible to those interested in the activist and her extraordinary era