The Hairy Ape: Genre 1 key example

The Hairy Ape is an expressionist drama, written during the literary modernist period, which spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The play was published in 1922 and written in 1921. As a modernist play, The Hairy Ape deals with many of the ideas and themes that flooded the zeitgeist in the 1920s. As the text makes clear, one such concept was that of worker rights, which became sorely needed in the face of the increased exploitation that accompanied industrialization. In addition to themes of class struggle, literary works within the modernist genre also frequently address concerns of technology vs. humanity, scientific innovation (e.g. evolution, genetics/genetic engineering), population, isolation/alienation, and the “moral quality” of the populace (i.e. eugenics, social Darwinism).