Edwardian Shaw covers Shaw's campaigns and crusades in the crucial first ten years of the century, when his career hung in the balance. By going to contemporary documents and highlighting aspects of Shaw's career at this time, particularly his emergence as a moral revolutionary and playwright of original and disquieting power, Leon Hugo depicts a man who confronted a highly conservative world and managed by the force of his genius to stamp his personality on the age.
Edwardian Culture: Beyond the Garden Party is the first truly interdisciplinary collection of essays dealing with culture in Britain c.1895-1914. Bringing together essays on literature, art, politics, religion, architecture, marketing, and imperial history, the study highlights the extent to which the culture and politics of Edwardian period were closely intertwined. The book builds upon recent scholarship that seeks to reclaim the term ‘Edwardian’ from prevalent, restrictive usages by venturing beyond the garden party – and the political rally – to uncover some of the terrain that lies between. The essays in the volume – which deal with both famous writers such as J. M. Barrie and Arnold Bennett, as well as many lesser-known figures – draw attention to the nuanced multiplicity of experience and cultural forms that existed during the period, and highlight the ways in which a closer examination of Edwardian culture complicates our definitions of ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modern’. The book argues that the Edwardian era, rather than constituting a coda to the Victorian period or a languid pause before modernism shook things up, possessed a compelling and creative tenor of its own.
SHAW 18 offers fourteen articles that illuminate aspects of Shaw's family history, relations with contemporaries, evolving reputation, and dramatic works. Dan H. Laurence presents an authoritative genealogy of the Shaw and Gurly sides of Shaw's family. Among discoveries that have long eluded Shaw's biographers is the birthdate of Elinor Agnes "Yuppy" Shaw, Shaw's sister. Michael W. Pharand assesses Shaw's intense dislike of Sarah Bernhardt. Stanley Weintraub analyzes Shaw's presence in the plays of Eugene O'Neill. Shaw's Advice to Irishmen, a newspaper account of Shaw's 1918 Dublin lecture "Literature in Ireland," records Shaw's comments on George Moore, J. M. Synge, and James Joyce. Robert G. Everding surveys Shaw festivals from 1916 in Ireland to the present-day Shaw festivals in Ontario and Milwaukee. In a review of Frank Harris on Bernard Shaw (1931), Richard Aldington dismisses Shaw as human being, thinker, and dramatist: "You must be a Shavian to admire and love Shaw the artist." In an interview with Leon Hugo, biographer Michael Holroyd discusses his biography of G.B.S., responses to his biography, and future work involving G.B.S. Jeffrey M. Wallmann argues that alienation in Shaw's plays enhances their contemporary value. Bernard F. Dukore investigates Shaw's reasons for discarding the original final act of The Philanderer. Rodelle Weintraub argues persuasively that You Never Can Tell requires the audience to choose between "Crampton's reality" and "Crampton's dream." Mark H. Sterner, weighing the various charges against Ann Whitefield's character in Man and Superman, concludes that Shaw's treatment of her and Tanner "as significantly different, but nevertheless equal . . . in itself was a revolutionary change in the status of sexual power relationships." Julie A. Sparks identifies W. W. Henley's sonnet "'Liza" as a likely source not only for some of Eliza's traits in Pygmalion but also for images in Man and Superman and Major Barbara. Charles A. Carpenter considers Buoyant Billions and Farfetched Fables in the context of Shaw's response to the birth of the atomic age. Paul Bauschatz, evaluating the differences between My Fair Lady and Pygmalion, illustrates why the film can reflect Shaw's play "only uneasily." SHAW 18 includes five reviews of recent additions to Shavian scholarship as well as John R. Pfeiffer's "Continuing Checklist of Shaviana."
Shaw, now in its twenty-third year, publishes general articles on Shaw and his milieu, reviews, notes, and the authoritative Continuing Checklist of Shaviana, the bibliography of Shaw studies.
Bernard Shaw fashioned public images of himself that belied the nature and depth of his emotional experiences and the complexity of his intellectual outlook. In this absorbing biography, noted Shavian authority A. M. Gibbs debunks many of the elements that form the foundation of Shaw's self-created legend--from his childhood (which was not the loveless experience he claimed publicly), to his sexual relationships with several women, to his marriage, his politics, his Irish identity, and his controversial philosophy of Creative Evolution. Drawing on previously unpublished materials, including never-before-seen photographs and early sketches by Shaw, Gibbs offers a fresh perspective and brings us closer than ever before to the human being behind the masks.
A collection of critical writings on music from the Nobel Prize–winning playwright behind Saint Joan and Man and Superman. The Critical Shaw: On Music is a comprehensive selection of renowned Irish playwright and Nobel Laureate Bernard Shaw’s extensive writings on a wide range of musical topics. Still recognized as one of Great Britain’s most important music critics, Shaw enriched London’s musical scene for some twenty years with his provocative, original, and penetrating reviews, before giving up music criticism to concentrate his talents on playwriting. His vast critical output encompassed opera, operetta, vocal and orchestral performance, musical theater, and oratorios, and took in major composers and performers as well as many long since forgotten names. Frequently embellished by his controversial political and social opinions, and delving as well into the nature of music criticism itself, Shaw’s reviews continue to stimulate and surprise, their depth and range setting standards that are rarely, if ever, matched today. Included in this edition is a previously unpublished draft on voice training prepared by Shaw for Vandeleur Lee, his mother’s singing teacher. The Critical Shaw series brings together, in five volumes and from a wide range of sources, selections from Bernard Shaw’s voluminous writings on topics that exercised him for the whole of his professional career: Literature, Music, Politics, Religion, and Theater. The volumes are edited by leading Shaw scholars, and all include an introduction, a chronology of Shaw’s life and works, annotated texts, and a bibliography. The series editor is L.W. Conolly, literary adviser to the Shaw Estate and former president of the International Shaw Society.
"Examples of faux authenticity abound in today's marketplace. Trading on the commercial appeal of the ersatz real, however, is far from a twenty-first century invention. As Consuming Traditions investigates, the allure of commodified nostalgia and the selling of the "genuine" article emerged as powerful forces in early twentieth-century Britain." "Elizabeth Outka redefines the debates surrounding literary modernism and the market as she explores the marketing of authenticity, a crucial but overlooked development in the history of modernity. With an interdisciplinary approach that probes novels, plays, advertisements, and architecture, Consuming Traditions presents a convincing case for how the "commodified authentic" - the selling of objects and places allegedly free of commercial taint - marks a critical turn in modern culture and offers a new way to understand literary modernism and its complex negotiation of tradition and novelty. Drawing on cultural studies, theories of consumerism, and works by Shaw, Forster, Woolf, Joyce, and others, Outka examines how literature both enacted and critiqued the larger revolution in material culture."--BOOK JACKET.
This book investigates how, alongside Beatrice Webb’s ground-breaking pre-World War One anti-poverty campaigns, George Bernard Shaw helped launch the public debate about the relationship between equality, redistribution and democracy in a developed economy. The ten years following his great 1905 play on poverty Major Barbara present a puzzle to Shaw scholars, who have hitherto failed to appreciate both the centrality of the idea of equality in major plays like Getting Married, Misalliance, and Pygmalion, and to understand that his major political work, 1928’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism had its roots in this period before the Great War. As both the era’s leading dramatist and leader of the Fabian Society, Shaw proposed his radical postulate of equal incomes as a solution to those twin scourges of a modern industrial society: poverty and inequality. Set against the backdrop of Beatrice Webb’s famous Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law 1905-1909 – a publication which led to grass-roots campaigns against destitution and eventually the Welfare State – this book considers how Shaw worked with Fabian colleagues, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and H. G. Wells to explore through a series of major lectures, prefaces and plays, the social, economic, political, and even religious implications of human equality as the basis for modern democracy.
“Dukore’s style is fluid and his wit delightful. I learned a tremendous amount, as will most readers, and Bernard Shaw and the Censors will doubtless be the last word on the topic.” - Michel Pharand, former editor of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies and author of Bernard Shaw and the French (2001). "This book shows us a new side of Shaw and his complicated relationships to the powerful mechanisms of stage and screen censorship in the long twentieth century.” - - Lauren Arrington, Professor of English, Maynooth University, Ireland A fresh view of Shaw versus stage and screen censors, this book describes Shaw as fighter and failure, whose battles against censorship – of his plays and those of others, of his works for the screen and those of others – he sometimes won but usually lost. We forget usually, because ultimately he prevailed and because his witty reports of defeats are so buoyant, they seem to describe triumphs. We think of him as a celebrity, not an outsider; as a classic, not one of the avant-garde, of which Victorians and Edwardians were intolerant; as ahead of his time, not of it, when he was called “disgusting,” “immoral", and "degenerate.” Yet it took over three decades and a world war before British censors permitted a public performance of Mrs Warren’s Profession. We remember him as an Academy Award winner for Pygmalion, not as an author whose dialogue censors required deletions for showings in the United States. Scrutinizing the powerful stage and cinema censorship in Britain and America, this book focuses on one of its most notable campaigners against them in the last century.
