Blackwell Reference Online

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The modern drama … rides in on the second wave of Romanticism – not the cheerful optimism of Rousseau … but rather the dark fury of Nietzsche, with his radical demands for a total transformation of man's spiritual life.Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt (1962)Any account of American drama must begin by noting the casual disregard with which it has been treated by the critical establishment…. In the standard histories of American literature it is accorded at best a marginal position.C. W. E. Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945–1990 (1992)Robert Brustein's description of an international phenomenon in the later nineteenth century that included the work of such figures as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, and Bernard Shaw, and C. W. E. Bigsby's of a condition that still obtains in criticism of American letters, can tell us much about the difficulties a “modern” drama experienced just coming into being. Consider, for example, the paradoxical situation in which well-known critic Harold Bloom found himself in introducing two books on Arthur Miller, whose plays remain central to the American theatrical repertory. In his introduction to a 1987 anthology of essays on Miller, Bloom identifies what he regards as the “half-dozen crucial American plays”: Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), which he disparages as reading “poorly,” Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (1939, first ... log in or subscribe to read full text