Each volume of Drama for Students contains easily accessible and content-rich discussions of the literary and historical background of 12 to 15 works from various cultures and time periods. Each play covered in this new resource was specially chosen by an advisory panel of teachers and librarians -- experts who have helped us define the information needs of students and ensure the age-appropriateness of this references content. Entries profiling film versions of plays not only diversify the study of drama but support alternate learning styles, media literacy, and film studies curricula as well.

Stephen Siddall's study of one of Ibsen s most innovative plays places it firmly in the context of nineteenth century European theatre, novelty theatre, and the society of Norway of its time.

Brian Johnston sees Ibsen's twelve realist plays as a single cyclical work, the "realist" method of which hides a much larger poetic intention than has previously been suspected. He believes that the cycle constitutes one of the major works of the European imagination, comparable in scale to Goethe or Dante. And he has shown Ibsen to be the heir to Romantic and Hegelian art and thought, adapting this heritage to the circumstances of his own day.This work demonstrates how the language and scene, characters and "props," of the Ibsen dramas establish a bold and far-reaching theatrical goal: nothing less than an account of our biological and cultural identity in its multilayered totality.

Each volume of Drama for Students contains easily accessible and content-rich discussions of the literary and historical background of 12 to 15 works from various cultures and time periods. Each play covered in this new resource was specially chosen by an advisory panel of teachers and librarians -- experts who have helped us define the information needs of students and ensure the age-appropriateness of this references content. Entries profiling film versions of plays not only diversify the study of drama but support alternate learning styles, media literacy, and film studies curricula as well.

The landmark play A Raisin in the Sun takes its title from a Langston Hughes poem which poses the questions "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" Focusing on a working-class African-American family in Chicago who save enough to purchase either a business in a black neighborhood or a house in a white neighborhood, the plays exposes issues of racism and gender as the women of the family make important decisions that push against both racial and gender lines.

A "loving, lavishly detailed" (New York Times) and captivating portrait of Lorraine Hansberry's life, art, and political activism--one of O Magazine's best books of April 2021   "A devoted and deeply felt account of the development of an artist's mind."--Dave Itzkoff, New York Times Book Review (2021 Summer Reading issue)   In this acclaimed biography of Lorraine Hansberry, Soyica Diggs Colbert narrates a life at the intersection of art and politics, arguing that for Hansberry the theater operated as a rehearsal room for her political and intellectual work. Celebrated for her play A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry was also the author of innovative journalism and of plays touching on slavery, interracial communities, and Black freedom movements. Hansberry was deeply involved in the Black freedom struggle during the Cold War and in the early civil rights movement, and here Colbert shows us an artist's life with the background of the Greenwich Village art scene in the 1960s, the homophile movement, Black diasporic freedom movements, and third-wave feminism.