Shaw, now in its twenty-fourth year, publishes general articles on Shaw and his milieu, reviews, notes, and the authoritative Continuing Checklist of Shaviana, the bibliography of Shaw studies.

This book investigates how, alongside Beatrice Webb’s ground-breaking pre-World War One anti-poverty campaigns, George Bernard Shaw helped launch the public debate about the relationship between equality, redistribution and democracy in a developed economy. The ten years following his great 1905 play on poverty Major Barbara present a puzzle to Shaw scholars, who have hitherto failed to appreciate both the centrality of the idea of equality in major plays like Getting Married, Misalliance, and Pygmalion, and to understand that his major political work, 1928’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism had its roots in this period before the Great War. As both the era’s leading dramatist and leader of the Fabian Society, Shaw proposed his radical postulate of equal incomes as a solution to those twin scourges of a modern industrial society: poverty and inequality. Set against the backdrop of Beatrice Webb’s famous Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law 1905-1909 – a publication which led to grass-roots campaigns against destitution and eventually the Welfare State – this book considers how Shaw worked with Fabian colleagues, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and H. G. Wells to explore through a series of major lectures, prefaces and plays, the social, economic, political, and even religious implications of human equality as the basis for modern democracy.

Dionysus, god of dismemberment and sponsor of the lost or abandoned feminine, originates both Jungian psychology and literature in Remembering Dionysus. Characterized by spontaneity, fluid boundaries, sexuality, embodiment, wild nature, ecstasy and chaos, Dionysus is invoked in the writing of C. G. Jung and James Hillman as the dual necessity to adopt and dismiss literature for their archetypal vision of the psyche or soul. Susan Rowland describes an emerging paradigm for the twenty-first century enacting the myth of a god torn apart to be re-membered, and remembered as reborn in a great renewal of life. Rowland demonstrates how persons, forms of knowing and even eras that dismiss Dionysus are torn apart, and explores how Jung was Dionysian in providing his most dismembered text, The Red Book. Remembering Dionysus pursues the rough god into the Sublime in the destruction of meaning in Jung and Jacques Lacan, to a re-membering of sublime feminine creativity that offers zoe, or rebirth participating in an archetype of instinctual life. This god demands to be honoured inside our knowing and being, just as he (re)joins us to wild nature. This revealing book will be invigorating reading for Jungian analysts, psychotherapists, arts therapists and counsellors, as well as academics and students of analytical psychology, depth psychology, Jungian and post-Jungian studies, literary studies and ecological humanities.

SHAW 25 offers eighteen articles, thirteen initially presented at the International Shaw Society conference, 17-21 March 2004, Sarasota, Florida. Additional conference and Shaw Festival Symposia information is provided in the Introduction. Stanley Weintraub's conference keynote, "Shaw for the Here and Now," considers modernizing Shaw's plays, validating Shaw's creative force for today and into the future. Dan H. Laurence's delightful "Shaw's Children" shows a warm, caring, playful Shaw--a giver of self. Howard Ira Einsohn's article on gifting brings together Shaw, Ricoeur, and Derrida to explore the ethics of giving "superabundantly" but not foolishly. Jay Tunney reflects on the ways in which his father, boxer Gene Tunney, fits the personal and professional shoes of Shaw's Cashel Byron, with life imitating art. In "Machiavelli, the Shark, and the Tinpot Tragedienne," Bernard F. Dukore delivers a rereading of Major Barbara that highlights characters and traits, revealing an ensnarling web of beliefs, values, actions, and consequences. Sidney P. Albert's essay explores connections between Major Barbara and Plato's Republic. Using a current theoretical lens, Vicki R. Kennell sees Pygmalion as a narrative literary bridge that predicates postmodern critiques. L.W. Conolly's research on Phillipa Summers reveals a model for Vivie Warren and provides insights into women's lives and education at the turn of the century. In "Who's Modern Now? Shaw, Joyce, and Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken," Kathleen Ochshorn looks at the interrelationships of the three dramatists. Miriam Chirico rewrites critical opinion of You Never Can Tell, arguing that the play is a serious social critique, particularly of marriage. Citing two well-documented instances of Shaw-bashing, John A. Bertolini explores Shaw's responses and reveals Shaw's fair-mindedness. Hannes Schweiger's detailed research substantiates Shaw's influential connection to Viennese culture and politics. Valerie Barnes Lipscomb analyzes Shaw's use of age differences to subvert romantic expectations, thereby drawing greater attention to serious sociocultural issues. Part II continues the legacy of Shaw scholarship with Charles A. Carpenter's must-read bibliographic piece, which reads like a mystery and gives a wealth of research information on Shaw. Focusing on the importance and difficulties of cycle plays, Julie Sparks looks at Man and Superman, Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah, and current offerings such as Kushner's Angels in America. Kay Li, tracing the influence of Shaw on Chinese drama, argues that modern Chinese drama emerged from the failure of Mrs. Warren's Profession. Frank Duba's article analyzes the evolving role of the Preface in Shaw's works, focusing especially on Man and Superman. Coming full circle, the volume returns to Stanley Weintraub's presentation of Shaw and the fascinating story of Lady Colin Campbell--a story that asks us to consider what it means to be endowed with beauty, fame, and ambition, and what it means to finally lose them. Finally, Michael W. Pharand's addendum to SHAW 24 gives supplementary bibliography on Shavian matters related to love, sex, marriage, and women. SHAW 25 also includes reviews as well as John R. Pfieffer's "Continuing Checklist of Shaviana."

Bernard Shaw fashioned public images of himself that belied the nature and depth of his emotional experiences and the complexity of his intellectual outlook. In this absorbing biography, noted Shavian authority A. M. Gibbs debunks many of the elements that form the foundation of Shaw's self-created legend--from his childhood (which was not the loveless experience he claimed publicly), to his sexual relationships with several women, to his marriage, his politics, his Irish identity, and his controversial philosophy of Creative Evolution. Drawing on previously unpublished materials, including never-before-seen photographs and early sketches by Shaw, Gibbs offers a fresh perspective and brings us closer than ever before to the human being behind the masks.

A collection of critical writings on theater from the Nobel Prize–winning playwright behind Man and Superman and Pygmalion. The Critical Shaw: On Theater is a comprehensive selection of essays and addresses about drama and theater by renowned Irish playwright and Nobel Laureate Bernard Shaw. An outspoken critic of the melodramas and formulaic farces that comprised most of the popular theater in the late nineteenth century, Shaw relentlessly campaigned for audiences, actors, theater managers, and even government officials to take theater more seriously, to use the stage as a forum for representing complex real issues such as poverty, marriage and divorce laws, sexual attraction, gender equality, and political power, so that through seeing them acted out, audiences could better understand and address them when they left the theater. Shaw’s commitment to social reform through theater was matched by his expertise in the artistic and practical aspects of drama: whether he was reviewing productions, lecturing about acting, or schooling agents on royalties and copyright law, Shaw set a standard for intelligent professionalism that our own theaters might still aspire to and be measured against. The Critical Shaw series brings together, in five volumes and from a wide range of sources, selections from Bernard Shaw’s voluminous writings on topics that exercised him for the whole of his professional career: Literature, Music, Politics, Religion, and Theater. The volumes are edited by leading Shaw scholars, and all include an introduction, a chronology of Shaw’s life and works, annotated texts, and a bibliography. The series editor is L.W. Conolly, literary adviser to the Shaw Estate and former president of the International Shaw Society.