Overview

Reveals the untold story of Irish drama's engagement with modernity's sexual and social revolutions The first modern Irish playwrights emerged in London in the 1890s, at the intersection of a rising international socialist movement and a new campaign for gender equality and sexual freedom. Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions shows how Irish playwrights mediated between the sexual and the socialist revolutions, and traces their impact on left theatre in Europe and America from the 1890s to the 1960s. Drawing on original archival research, the study reconstructs the engagement of Yeats, Shaw, Wilde, Synge, O'Casey, and Beckett with socialists and sexual radicals like Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Florence Farr, Bertolt Brecht, and Lorraine Hansberry. Key Features Argues for and models a way of reconciling Marxist politics with identity politics, instead of privileging one over the otherOffers the first sustained investigation of Irish drama's engagement with left culture in Europe and North AmericaOffers fresh readings of canonical plays by major authors while elaborating a new and generative argument about Ireland's contribution to modern drama and literary modernismUses hard-to-find archival sources to recover and reinterpret crucial but forgotten and/or misunderstood moments in theater history and in the history of the cultural leftBrings Marxist and feminist/queer theoretical concerns together to produce a nuanced and revealing account of the interaction between sexual and social politics in the first half of the twentieth century

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9781474424462

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Reviews

The study sustains its momentum with engaging prose and a sense of purpose. More than a cultural survey, Harris's study aims to recover an alternative internationalist model than the fashionable ‘global/world paradigm’ or ‘the postcolonial narrative that established the basis of Irish Studies as a discipline’ and to remind our contemporary sensibilities that ‘these revolutions’, sexual and socialist, ‘need not and should not be in opposition or in competition’ (238–9). On both counts, Harris emphatically succeeds. -- Daniel Gomes, Bakersfield College * Modernist Cultures * Susan Cannon Harris’s Gender and Modern Irish Drama firmly established her as one of the most innovative critical voices in contemporary Irish Studies, and this book wonderfully confirms her well-deserved reputation. Its deep engagement with political, gender and queer theories − and its exceptional close readings of plays by Yeats, Shaw, O'Casey and others − makes Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions the most original and important book I have read in a very long time. * Stephen Watt, Indiana University, Bloomington *

"The study sustains its momentum with engaging prose and a sense of purpose. More than a cultural survey, Harris's study aims to recover an alternative internationalist model than the fashionable 'global/world paradigm' or 'the postcolonial narrative that established the basis of Irish Studies as a discipline' and to remind our contemporary sensibilities that 'these revolutions', sexual and socialist, 'need not and should not be in opposition or in competition' (238-9). On both counts, Harris emphatically succeeds.--Daniel Gomes, Bakersfield College ""Modernist Cultures"" Susan Cannon Harris's Gender and Modern Irish Drama firmly established her as one of the most innovative critical voices in contemporary Irish Studies, and this book wonderfully confirms her well-deserved reputation. Its deep engagement with political, gender and queer theories - and its exceptional close readings of plays by Yeats, Shaw, O'Casey and others - makes Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions the most original and important book I have read in a very long time.-- ""Stephen Watt, Indiana University, Bloomington"""

The study sustains its momentum with engaging prose and a sense of purpose. More than a cultural survey, Harris's study aims to recover an alternative internationalist model than the fashionable 'global/world paradigm' or 'the postcolonial narrative that established the basis of Irish Studies as a discipline' and to remind our contemporary sensibilities that 'these revolutions', sexual and socialist, 'need not and should not be in opposition or in competition' (238-9). On both counts, Harris emphatically succeeds.--Daniel Gomes, Bakersfield College ""Modernist Cultures"" Susan Cannon Harris's Gender and Modern Irish Drama firmly established her as one of the most innovative critical voices in contemporary Irish Studies, and this book wonderfully confirms her well-deserved reputation. Its deep engagement with political, gender and queer theories - and its exceptional close readings of plays by Yeats, Shaw, O'Casey and others - makes Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions the most original and important book I have read in a very long time.-- ""Stephen Watt, Indiana University, Bloomington""

Author Information

Susan Cannon Harris is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Keough Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her book Gender and Modern Irish Drama (IUP, 2002) was awarded the Donald Murphy Prize for a Distinguished First Book and the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature by the American Conference for Irish Studies. Harris has published on eighteenth century Irish theater, contemporary Irish drama, and modern British fiction.

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