Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics and the International Left, 1892-1964 - Paperback

by Susan Cannon Harris (Author)

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 other
• Offers the first sustained investigation of Irish drama's engagement with left culture in Europe and North America
• Offers fresh readings of canonical plays by major authors while elaborating a new and generative argument about Ireland's contribution to modern drama and literary modernism
• Uses 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 left
• Brings 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

Back Jacket

'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 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 socialist and sexual radicals like Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Florence Farr, Bertolt Brecht and Lorraine Hansberry. Susan Canon Harris is Associate Professor the Department of English and Keough Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her book Gender and Modern Irish Drama 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. Cover image: original German-language poster for Senora Carrar's Rifles Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk

Author Biography

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.