Socialism, Masculinity, and the ‘Faddist’ Sage: Edward Carpenter and George Bernard Shaw

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Livesey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Good Friend ◽  
George Bernard Shaw ◽  
Species Change ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
Edward Carpenter ◽  
Socialist Utopia ◽  
Bernard Shaw

Schreiner's good friend Edward Carpenter was her chief source of news about the socialist movement during her self-imposed exiles on the continent throughout the later 1880s. Carpenter sought to reshape masculinity and civilization through sexual desire itself. This chapter examines how the fads of vegetarianism, Jaegerism, and sandal wearing came to be associated with socialism in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that for Carpenter and George Bernard Shaw, these ascetic regimes provided a means of investigating and reforming conventional ideals of masculinity. Both writers represent such fads as bodily labour and discipline, thus overcoming the opposition between the man of letters and the manly labourer. While Carpenter's theory of Lamarckian biological idealism concluded that such practices would result in species change and a socialist utopia of liberated sexual bodies, Shaw's regime aimed to supplement the necessary redistribution of capital.

Theatre

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linzy Brady ◽  
Jolyon Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Leo Tolstoy ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
George Bernard Shaw ◽  
Silent Films ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Religious Plays ◽  
Bernard Shaw ◽  
Christian Beliefs

How did the relation between Christianity and drama evolve during the long nineteenth century? How were Christian beliefs represented, promoted, and interrogated through drama? What part did Christianity play in the changing kinds, spaces, and genres of theatre? This chapter analyses the creation, production, and reception of a range of dramatic forms, including melodramas, musicals, ‘classics’, comedies, and tragedies, as well as explicitly religious, and later in the nineteenth century, cinematic dramas. Plays by George Bernard Shaw, Leo Tolstoy, and Henrik Ibsen are scrutinized alongside early silent films and the evolving passion and religious plays tradition. The chapter teases out a number of underlying tensions relating to the place of Christianity within popular and respectable theatre, romantic and realistic drama, and theatrical and screen drama. The chapter highlights how Christian beliefs were creatively used by playwrights, actors, and theatre-goers, in theatrical, domestic, and public spaces.

Desiring Women: Irish Playwrights, New Women and Queer Socialism, 1892–1894

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Cannon Harris
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
George Bernard Shaw ◽  
William Morris ◽  
English Drama ◽  
New Women ◽  
Edward Carpenter ◽  
Bernard Shaw

The interrelationship between sexual and social revolutions in London in the 1890s shaped both the Irish dramatic revival and twentieth-century English drama. W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw both embraced a socialism rooted in the radical eros of Percy Bysshe Shelley and developed by William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and Edward Carpenter. This “queer socialism” (the chapter acknowledges but departs from from Patrick Mullen’s earlier use of the phrase) was defined by its insistence on pleasure as the means and as the end of social progress. Yeats, Shaw, and John Todhunter—all Shelley enthusiasts, and all fascinated by Florence Farr’s bisexuality—contributed plays to a season that Farr produced at the Avenue Theatre. The opening night audience violently protested the double bill of Yeats’s Land of Heart’s Desire and Todhunter’s A Comedy of Sighs, in part because both plays mythologized the New Woman’s transgressive sexuality through occult representations of lesbian desire. Shaw moved to protect himself from homophobic condemnation by replacing Farr in the lead role of Arms and the Man with a more gender-conforming actress. After Shaw’s brilliant success, Yeats decided to pursue his dramatic career in Dublin, leaving Shaw to found a straightforwardly socialist dramatic revival in London.

Fabians and the Utilitarian Idea of Empire

1973 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred D. Schneider
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
George Bernard Shaw ◽  
External Interference ◽  
British Trade ◽  
Dominant Theme ◽  
Good Government ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Bernard Shaw

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, British imperial policy developed from two antithetical and mutually exclusive concepts. It aimed simultaneously at extending British trade and culture under the paternal authoritarianism of crown-colony rule, and it sought the progressive realization of colonial self-government through the spread and adaptation of British institutions. The first concept sprang from the utilitarian criterion of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” and emphasized law rather than liberty as the great instrument of human improvement. The second derived from the utilitarian doctrine of liberty, the claim for a sphere of activity within which the individual was sovereign and free from external interference. In practice, the first was deemed appropriate for the tropical parts of Britain's mercantile empire, the second for colonies of British settlers overseas. With the outbreak of war in South Africa in 1899 these two concepts came into signal opposition, and the Fabians, intellectual heirs of utilitarianism, encountered difficulty in reconciling them. One faction, led by Ramsay MacDonald, held the issue to be one of freedom and maintained that good government was no substitute for self-government. The majority, under the influence of Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw, rejected the idea that Britain must educate subject peoples towards self-government and advanced an intellectual justification for autocratic control in the dependent empire. So far as the empire was concerned, Webb and Shaw aimed less at reconstructing political institutions than at making existing institutions work more effectively. In its Fabian metamorphosis, the utilitarian idea of empire thus displayed a zeal for order and centralization, and its dominant theme was greater efficiency.

Looking Backward 2000-1887

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Bellamy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Ideal Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
Utopian Fiction ◽  
Socialist Utopia ◽  
Year 2000 ◽  
The Ideal

‘No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.’ Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people’s everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont’s lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction.

Lady Audley’s Secret

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Good Friend ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret ◽  
Conventional Picture

It only rests with yourself to become Lady Audley, and the mistress of Audley Court.’ When beautiful young Lucy Graham accepts the hand of Sir Michael Audley, her fortune and her future look secure. But Lady Audley’s past is shrouded in mystery, and to Sir Michael’s nephew Robert, she is not all that she seems. When his good friend George Talboys suddenly disappears, Robert is determined to find him, and to unearth the truth. His quest reveals a tangled story of lies and deception, crime and intrigue, whose sensational twists turn the conventional picture of Victorian womanhood on its head. Can Robert’s darkest suspicions really be true? Lady Audley’s Secret was an immediate bestseller, and readers have enjoyed its thrilling plot ever since its first publication in 1862. This new edition explores Braddon’s portrait of her scheming heroine in the context of the nineteenth-century sensation novel and the lively, often hostile debates it provoked.

scholarly journals PYGMALION: A STUDY OF SOCIO-SEMANTICS

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 202
Author(s):  
Mirjam Anugerahwati
Keyword(s):  
Communicative Competence ◽  
George Bernard Shaw ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Bernard Shaw ◽  
The Way

This article discusses the novel Pygmalionby George Bernard Shaw (1957) which depicts Eliza, a flower girl from East London, who became the subject of an “experiment” by a Professor of Phonetics who vowed to change the way she spoke. The story is an excellent example of a very real and contextual portrait of how language, particularly socio-semantics, play a role in the achievement of communicative competence.

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