This book focuses on two important topics in Shaw’s Major Barbara and Pygmalion that have received little attention from critics: language and metadrama. If we look beyond the social, political, and economic issues that Shaw explored in these two plays, we discover that the stories of the two “Shavian sisters”— Barbara Undershaft and Eliza Doolittle—are deeply concerned with performance and what Jacques Derrida calls “the problem of language.” Nearly every character in Major Barbara produces, directs, or acts in at least one miniature play. In...

This book details the Irish socialistic tracks pursued by Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey, mostly after 1916, that were arguably impacted by the executed James Connolly. The historical context is carefully unearthed, stretching from its 1894 roots via W. B. Yeats’ dream of Shaw as a menacing, yet grinning sewing machine, to Shaw’s and O’Casey’s 1928 masterworks. In the process, Shaw’s War Issues for Irishmen, Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress, The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, Saint Joan, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and...

Bernard Shaw on the American Stage is the first comprehensive study of the production of Bernard Shaw’s plays in America. During his lifetime (1856-1950), Shaw was America’s most popular living playwright; productions of his plays were outnumbered only by Shakespeare. Forty-four of Shaw’s plays were staged in America before his death, eight more posthumously. Eleven of the productions were world premieres. Bernard Shaw on the American Stage tells the story of the fifty-two premieres, which, apart from a few fragments, is his total dramatic oeuvre. The...

Shaw emerged as a playwright in the politically charged environment of 1892, for both female suffrage and Irish independence. His plays quickly advocated for societal changes with regard to women’s roles, while expanding this advocacy into considerations of Ireland. Shaw’s engagement with marriage and union as a personal contract with nationhood have never before been considered as a methodology with which to view his work. This book demonstrates that Shaw was deeply engaged with and committed to the Irish question and to social and gender issues.

Shaw emerged as a playwright in the politically charged environment of 1892, for both female suffrage and Irish independence. His plays quickly advocated for societal changes with regard to women’s roles, while expanding this advocacy into considerations of Ireland. Shaw’s engagement with marriage and union as a personal contract with nationhood have never before been considered as a methodology with which to view his work. This book demonstrates that Shaw was deeply engaged with and committed to the Irish question and to social and gender issues.

This book explores a heretofore unremarked linkage between Bernard Shaw, the twentieth-century French thinker Paul Ricoeur, and Jesus of Nazareth. The ties that bind them are a foundational interest in the social teachings of the Nazarene and their use of a shared dialectics with respect to living the kind of compassionate life that holds out the promise in our contemporary world of achieving something approximating universal wellness on a healthy planet at peace with itself. This work argues that the three principal subjects of the study—independently of...

​This project is the first to explore how Bernard Shaw intersects constructively with automata, robots and artificial intelligence (AI). Shaw was born in the golden age of the automaton. His Bible on the Life Force and Creative Evolution, Back to Methuselah, was written when Karel and Josef Čapek coined the word “robot.” Shaw’s life ran in parallel with the rise of AI, and the big names in AI were his contemporaries. Moreover, empirical analyses of Shavian texts and images using AI uncovers possibilities for new interpretations, demonstrating how future...