Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions

Abstract

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. Tracing the interactions and developments of these two revolutions from decadent London to Cold War New York, this book rereads both canonical and under-studied Irish plays and playwrights in the context of the history and culture of the international left—including utopian socialism, land nationalization, syndicalism, workers’ theatre, and McCarthyism. Drawing on archival research and contemporary queer theory, 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. By examining the work of these Irish playwrights in the context of two other revolutions that defined the twentieth century, this book offers a richer understanding of the contributions of Irish playwrights to modern drama, and of the interactions between embodiment and ideology that continue to define the possibilities and limitations of left politics in the twenty-first century.