THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MODERN DRAMA [SIGNED BY AUTHOR]

Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1914. 1st edition. Original printed cloth, 8vo, 315 + [1] + [4] pages + advertisements. Includes frontisportrait of Goldman. Study of several major and a few minor dramatists from Goldman's anarchist, social revolutionary viewpoint.
Contents include: The Scandinavian drama. Henrik Ibsen; August Strindberg -- The German drama. Hermann Sudermann; Gerhart Hauptmann; Frank Wedekind -- The French drama. Maurice Maeterlinc ; Edmond Rostand; Brieux -- The English drama. George Bernard Shaw; John Galsworthy; Stanley Houghton; Githa Sowerby -- The Irish drama. William Butler Yeats; Lenox Robinson; T.G. Murray -- The Russian drama. Leo Tolstoy; Anton Tchekhof; Maxim Gorki; Leonid Andreyev.
Emma Goldman (1869 - 1940) was a Russian-born anarchist, political activist, and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
Born in Kaunas, Lithuania (then within the Russian Empire), to an Orthodox Lithuanian Jewish family, Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885. Attracted to anarchism after the Chicago Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands. She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Frick survived the attempt on his life in 1892, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison.
Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for ‘inciting to riot' and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.
In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to ‘induce persons not to register' for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with 248 others—in the so-called Palmer Raids during the First Red Scare and deported to Russia in December 1919. Initially supportive of that country's October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, Goldman changed her opinion in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion; she denounced the Soviet Union for its violent repression of independent voices....
During her life, Goldman was lionized as a freethinking ‘rebel woman' by admirers, and denounced by detractors as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality.
Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman gained iconic status in the 1970s by a revival of interest in her life, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest" (WIkipedia).
Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold's copy (provenance only, no signature/stamp).
SUBJECT(S): Drama -- History and criticism. -- Political aspects. The´a^tre (Genre litte´raire) - Histoire et critique. -- Aspect politique. OCLC: 250723702. Lacking tissue guard at frontis? Professional archival repair to spine and one corner, paper toning, some corner wear, about Very Good- Condition. An attractive signed copy. (KH-1-16).