The Playwright as Thinker: A Study of Drama in Modern Times, Fourth Edition - Softcover

Bentley, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816672954 ISBN 13: 9780816672950

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2010

Synopsis

First published in 1946, The Playwright as Thinker is a classic work of drama criticism that helped create the intellectual environment in which serious American theater would thrive in the second half of the twentieth century. At the time of publishing, most drama critics believed dramatic art deserved no intellectual status; Eric Bentley set out to prove them wrong. Focusing on the canonic playwrights Strindberg, Ibsen, Pirandello, Sartre, and Brecht, Bentley viewed the playwright as thinker, and his survey of over 150 years of dramatic art provided, in essence, an intellectual history of Europe. This edition not only contains the original, long-suppressed foreword, in which Bentley lambastes the climate of Broadway at the time, but also the author's 1987 afterword.
 

About this title

About the Author

Critic, scholar, translator, and playwright, Eric Bentley has been Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. He served as drama critic of the New Republic and was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 1997-98. His most widely read books are Thinking about the Playwright, Bentley on Brecht, and The Kleist Variations. Richard Gilman (1923-2006) was one of the leading drama and literary critics of the second half of the twentieth century. He was a professor at the Yale School of Drama for thirty-one years and the author of five books of criticism and a memoir.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816672954
• ISBN 13: 9780816672950
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 4
• Number of pages: 416