Shaw's characteristic habit of pleasant exaggeration, and yet one felt that behind his exaggerations and his paradoxes there was always the thinker who has gone to the root of the matter. And it positions the Shaw text as pivotal in the historical break in Western culture between Victorian and modern worlds.īut of course all this was not to be taken too literally.

This book heralds a major shift in the future of Shaw studies, restoring Shaw to his rightful place as a major intellectual figure and writer, as one of the most important authors and dramatists of the early 20th century. For the first time, the play cycle Back to Methuselah-the work Shaw considered his magnum opus-is examined as central to the oeuvre. In concentrating on his less familiar plays, Gahan shows how Shaw incorporated themes like writing, language, meaning, and authorship into his playwriting, while acknowledging an awareness of the subjectivity of human experience in general and of the writer's experience in particular. Gahan looks at essays on music, science, and politics and at Shaw's critique of Darwinian theory, in which he calls for a new metaphysics within the discourse of science. Taking a fresh and thoughtful look at a wealth of readings, he examines Shaw's criticism and autobiographical writing, in which questions of authorship and subjectivity were crucial. Gahan first considers Shaw's poststructuralist pioneering thinking in a general, philosophical way.

Though sometimes dismissed as merely witty, Shaw should be considered one of the progenitors of contemporary literary studies, Gahan says, in that his work actually allows for ideas of theorists such as Derrida and Lacan.

Gahan's path-breaking book rereads Shaw's writing, dramatic and non-dramatic, against the background of critical theory in order to reassess its radical influence in both its own time and ours.

Shadows and Lies by Raine English