Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland

by Audrey McNamara (Editor), Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel (Editor)

Overview

This book is an anthology focused on Shaw’s efforts, literary and political, that worked toward a modernizing Ireland. Following Declan Kiberd’s Foreword and the editor’s Introduction, the contributing chapters, in their order of appearance, are from President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins, Anthony Roche, David Clare, Elizabeth Mannion, Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Aisling Smith, Susanne Colleary, Audrey McNamara, Aileen R. Ruane, Peter Gahan, and Gustavo A. Rodriguez Martin. The essays establish that Shaw’s Irishness was inherent and manifested itself in his work, demonstrating that Ireland was a recurring feature in his considerations. Locating Shaw within the march towards modernizing Ireland furthers the recent efforts to secure Shaw’s place within the Irish spheres of literature and politics.     

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030421137
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	07/13/2020
Series:	Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	586 KB

About the Author

Audrey McNamara’s monograph Bernard Shaw: From Womanhood to Nationhood (2020) is in progress. Other publications cover work on Bernard Shaw, Conor McPherson, Enda Walsh, and Benjamin Black. She is on the editorial board of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies and lectures at University College Dublin, Ireland.
Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel is the author of Bernard Shaw, W. T. Stead, and the New Journalism (2017) and Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation (2011). He is on the editorial board of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, and is Professor of Humanities at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, USA.   

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction; Audrey McNamara and Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel.- Chapter 2: Speech at the First International Shaw Conference, Dublin; President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins.- Chapter 3: 'The Rush of Air, the Windows Opened in Extravagance and Storm of an Idea ...': Kate O’Brien’s The Last of Summer and Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman; Anthony Roche.- Chapter 4: Shavian Echoes in the Work of Elizabeth Bowen; David Clare.- Chapter 5: 'An incorrigible propensity for preaching': Shaw and his Clergy; Elizabeth Mannion.- Chapter 6: Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey: Remembering James Connolly; Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel.- Chapter 7: WWI, Common Sense, and O’Flaherty, V. C.: Shaw Advocates a New Modernist Outlook for Ireland; Aisling Smith.- Chapter 8: O’Flaherty, V. C.: Satire as Shavian Agenda; Susanne Colleary.- Chapter 9: Shaw, Women and the Dramatizing of Modern Ireland; Audrey McNamara.- Chapter 10: The Economics of Identity:John Bull’s Other Island and the Creation of Modern Ireland; Aileen R. Ruane.- Chapter 11: Bernard Shaw in Two Great Irish Houses: Kilteragh and Coole; Peter Gahan.- Chapter 12: Shaw’s Ireland (and the Irish Shaw) in the International Press (1914-1925); Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín.-      

Editorial Reviews

The collection is successful in establishing what its coeditors set out to prove: that Shaw was a major Irish modernist, and more deeply engaged with Irish politics and the struggle for Irish independence than he and his supporters often liked to acknowledge. ... Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland opens up exciting new avenues for both Irish studies and Shaw scholarship.” (Susan Harris, Victorian Studies, Vol. 65 (2), 2023)

“Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland offers a valuable corrective to Shaw’s neglect by Irish studies, and I have learned a great deal from it. Indeed, my understanding of the Shavian canon and of ‘public Shaw’s’ involvement in Irish political discourse has undergone a salutary revision for which I am most grateful to the editors of and contributors to this excellent volume.” (Stephen Watt, SHAW The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, Vol. 41 (1), 2021)

From the Publisher