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. Among her
many books are My Disillusionment in Russia (1925) and Living My Life
(1931).
