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1
Ananisarab, Soudabeh. "George Bernard Shaw and the Malvern Festival." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2017. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/35979/.
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The Malvern Festival was established by Sir Barry Jackson in association with the lessee of the Malvern Theatre, Roy Limbert, in 1929. The Festival continued for ten seasons as an annual event until the outbreak of World War II in 1939, and then returned for one final season in 1949. The Festival was initially dedicated to the works of George Bernard Shaw with the repertoire of the first season wholly composed of the plays of this playwright. While during its twelve seasons the Festival fluctuated in the extent of its association with Shaw, in total the Festival presented two world premieres of Shaw’s plays and four British premieres. Furthermore, in addition to its dramatic productions, the Festival also featured other activities such as talks and exhibitions and attracted an impressive list of visitors and speakers including Allardyce Nicoll and Gabriel Pascal as well as performers such as Cedric Hardwicke and Stephen Murray. This thesis explores the development of the Malvern Festival, an event which has thus far given rise to scant academic scholarship. I argue that rediscovering the Malvern Festival has the potential to reorientate common critical understanding of early twentieth-century English theatre and its key locations. While much of the British theatre scholarship of this period has been concerned with drama in the capital, this study of Malvern demonstrates that regional theatres at this time had the capability of offering experimental drama which often failed to attract the attention of theatre managers in London. As the high prices of rent in the metropolis limited the financial risk accepted by many theatre managers in the early twentieth century, individuals such as Shaw and Jackson amongst others turned their attention away from London to the regions for new opportunities in staging a more experimental repertoire. This study of the Malvern Festival demonstrates that while Jackson and Shaw initially considered the Festival as the solution to their troubles with playhouses in London’s West End, the Festival soon became entangled with those familiar debates of venue and repertoire, and ultimately failed after twelve seasons. In the organisation of the Festival, there were a number of damaging contradictions, some of which were also evident in the ventures preceding the Festival such as the movement for building a National Theatre in England and the Vedrenne-Barker seasons at the Court Theatre. The Festival had simultaneous links with both the non-metropolitan, as a result of its location in Malvern, and the urban, through its target audience of the metropolitan elite. Thus while the Festival was held in Malvern, as a result of Jackson’s guiding philosophy much of the local population in Malvern were excluded from the activities included in the Festival. Additionally, the identity of the Festival was intertwined with both a sense of nostalgia for the past and an outlook towards the future. While Jackson emphasised less well-known classics in the repertoire of the Festival, he also flew critics into Malvern, and Limbert extended the activities of the Festival by presenting modern talkies. Other contradictions included Jackson’s pursuit of critical praise for the Festival’s productions and his desire to experiment away from theatrical norms, in addition to the lack of certainty surrounding the focus of the Festival which fluctuated between an emphasis on a star playwright, Shaw, and Jackson’s aim to celebrate the literary canon. Moreover, some of these clashes were then exacerbated by the Shavian drama performed as part of the Festival. It was the difficulties in reconciling such contradictions which resulted in the Festival’s failure to remain as an annual event. However, in this thesis I argue that regardless of the Festival’s lack of financial and popular success, the Malvern Festival allowed Shaw the creative space to write some of his most experimental work, which was then explored in production as part of the Festival on the stage of the Malvern Theatre.
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Matchett, Grace. "The relationship of parents and children in the English domestic plays of George Bernard Shaw." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1990. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1851/.
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The aim of this thesis is to bring a new critical perspective to the English domestic plays of George Bernard Shaw by analysing them in the light of Shaw's treatment of parent-child relationships. A domestic play is one in which the plot or problem centres around a family and in which the setting is that family's permanent or temporary home. The period 1890 and 1914 has been chosen for three reasons: first, it was during this time that Shaw began and succeeded in his career as a dramatist; secondly, this period saw the growth of the `new drama' movement, which considered a discussion of sociological issues a prerequisite for responsible dramatic literature, and thirdly, changes within the theatre itself, most noticeably Granville Barker's seasons at the Court Theatre (1904-1907) gave Shaw the opportunity to have his work intelligently and artistically presented to a growing audience of literary discrimination and social awareness. Heartbreak House is included in this analysis because although not finished until 1917 it was begun in 1913. The thesis begins with an examination of the influences on Shaw which made the treatment of the parent-child relationship a central theme of his earliest plays. These are (a) Biographical (b) Sociological (c) Theatrical - (i) Nineteenth century Popular Theatre including Melodrama (ii) Ibsenism Section Two describes Shaw's treatment of parents and children in his novels. The aim of this section is to demonstrate that the family relationships that assume major significance in the plays are prefigured in the novels not simply thematically but formally. In Section Three the English domestic plays are placed in four categories under the schematic headings which sometimes overlap: (a) Single Parents, Widowers' Houses, The Philanderer, Man and Superman, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House (b) The Return of the Absent Parent, Mrs Warren's Profession, You Never Can Tell, Major Barbara (c) Substitute Parents, You Never Can Tell, Candida, Man and Superman, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House (d) Happy Families, Getting Married, Misalliance, Fanny's First Play, The conclusion is that Shaw, in expressing his opinions on the relationships of children and their parents in the English domestic plays as well as in his other writings, was challenging the conventions of conventional middle-class society while at the same time expressing, perhaps compulsively, his personal quest for his own `true' parents.
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Byrne, Monique. "Bernard Shaw's reconfiguration of family in You never can tell." Click here for download, 2006. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/villanova/fullcit?p1432837.
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Nforbin, Gerald [Verfasser]. "Bernard Shaw's reconfiguration of dramatic genres as force-fields in socio-cultural and new aesthetic criticism / Gerald Nforbin." Gießen : Universitätsbibliothek, 2012. http://d-nb.info/1063953642/34.
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Matsuba, Stephen N. "The Prism of war : Shaw's treatment of war in Arms and the man and Heartbreak house." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26887.
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Many critics examine Shaw's plays in terms of the subjects they deal with, but they often ignore what aspects of these subjects Shaw draws on or how he uses them. One subject that appears in many of his works is war. This thesis examines Shaw's treatment of war in Arms and the Man and Heartbreak House, and attempts to discover a common element between them that reveals something not only about the plays themselves, but also about Shaw's drama in general.
The chapter on Arms and the Man notes how Shaw makes war a highly visible element of the play, but avoids dealing with issues directly related to war. Shaw does not draw on war itself, but on its image. The sources for Catherine's and Bluntschli's impressions
of both war and Sergius—Lady Butler's paintings, the military
melodrama and extravaganza, Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," and accounts of the Battle of Balaklava—indicate that the play's focus is not on war, but on how one perceives the world. This idea is further reinforced by Shaw's own views about idealism, romanticism, and realism.
Unlike Arms and the Man, war is an integral part of Heartbreak
House. Shaw uses elements from the British homefront during the First World War—the wasted lives of England's youth, the lies of the government and the press, and the potential for violence both on the front and at home during the conflict—to help create the play's deep sense of crisis and impending doom. But as with Arms and the Man, Heartbreak House is not a play about war. Whereas war is highly visible in the former, its presence is negligible
in the latter: there are no military characters or any clear indication that a war is in progress until the end of the play. Moreover, Shaw does not draw on sources related only to the war. Thus while Heartbreak House was born largely out of the despair of the First World War, its themes go beyond that conflict to deal with questions about the individual, the family, and the fabric of society itself.
This thesis concludes by briefly examining Saint Joan, and notes that it combines the two approaches to war found in Arms and the Man and Heartbreak House, but distances its intended audience—the English—by using a historical conflict where Englishmen are the enemy. In comparing the three plays' treatment of war, one can conclude that the common element in Shaw's treatment
of war is his distancing of an audience from the subject itself. Moreover, one discovers that this distancing is related to the nature of the subjects that Shaw uses for his plays. Only subjects that he believed were complex were suitable for creating his dramatic works. Therefore, it is fruitless for critics to examine Shaw's plays for his opinions about a subject; they should concentrate on how Shaw uses these subjects in his plays instead.Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
Graduate
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Fleagle, Matthew. "Socialist Sacrilege: The Provocative Contributions of George Bernard Shaw and George Orwell to Socialism in the 20th Century." Akron, OH : University of Akron, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=akron1248383758.
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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Akron, Dept. of English-Literature, 2009."August, 2009." Title from electronic thesis title page (viewed 10/21/2009) Advisor, Alan Ambrisco; Faculty readers, Hillary Nunn, Robert Pope; Department Chair, Michael Schuldiner; Dean of the College, Chand Midha; Dean of the Graduate School, George R. Newkome. Includes bibliographical references.
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Tracy, Hannah R. "Willing progress: The literary Lamarckism of Olive Schreiner, George Bernard Shaw, and William Butler Yeats." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10596.
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ix, 288 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.While the impact of Darwin's theory of evolution on Victorian and modernist literature has been well-documented, very little critical attention has been paid to the influence of Lamarckian evolutionary theory on literary portrayals of human progress during this same period. Lamarck's theory of inherited acquired characteristics provided an attractive alternative to the mechanism and materialism of Darwin's theory of natural selection for many writers in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, particularly those who refused to relinquish the role of the individual will in the evolutionary process. Lamarckian rhetoric permeated an ideologically diverse range of discourses related to progress, including reproduction, degeneration, race, class, eugenics, education, and even art. By analyzing the literary texts of Olive Schreiner, G.B. Shaw, and W.B. Yeats alongside their polemical writing, I demonstrate how Lamarckism inflected these writers' perceptions of the mechanism of human evolution and their ideas about human progress, and I argue that their work helped to sustain Lamarck's cultural influence beyond his scientific relevance. In the dissertation's introduction, I place the work of these three writers in the context of the Neo-Darwinian and Neo-Lamarckian evolutionary debates in order to establish the scientific credibility and cultural attractiveness of Lamarckism during this period. Chapter II argues that Schreiner creates her own evolutionary theory that rejects the cold, competitive materialism inherent in Darwinism and builds upon Lamarck's mechanism, modifying Lamarckism to include a uniquely feminist emphasis on the importance of community, motherhood, and self-sacrifice for the betterment of the human race. In Chapter III, I demonstrate that Shaw's "metabiological" religion of Creative Evolution, as portrayed in Man and Superman and Back to Methuselah , is not simply Bergsonian vitalism repackaged as a Neo-Lamarckian evolutionary theory but, rather, a uniquely Shavian theory of human progress that combines religious, philosophical, and political elements and is thoroughly steeped in contemporary evolutionary science. Finally, Chapter IV examines the interplay between Yeats's aesthetics and his anxieties about class in both his poetry and his 1939 essay collection On the Boiler to show how Lamarckian modes of thought inflected his understanding of degeneration and reproduction and eventually led him to embrace eugenics.
Committee in charge: Paul Peppis, Chairperson, English; Mark Quigley, Member, English; Paul Farber, Member, Not from U of O; Richard Stein, Member, English; John McCole, Outside Member, History
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McKee, Anthony Patrick Francis. "An anatomy of power : the early works of Bernard Mandeville." Thesis, Connect to e-thesis, 1991. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/675/.
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Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 1991.Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of English Literature, Faculty of Arts, University of Glasgow, 1991. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.
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Downing, Phoebe C. "Fabians and 'Fabianism' : a cultural history, 1884-1914." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:425127c1-94c1-4d20-ba58-fdd457c1f6b8.
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This thesis is a cultural history of the early Fabian Society, focusing on the decades between 1884, the Society’s inaugural year, and 1914. The canonical view is that ‘Fabianism,’ which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the ‘doctrine and principles of the Fabian Society,’ is synonymous with State socialism and bureaucratic ‘efficiency.’ By bringing the methods of cultural history to bear on the Society’s founding members and decades, this thesis reveals that ‘Fabianism’ was in fact used as a dynamic metonymy, not a fixed doctrine, which signified a range of cultural, and even literary, meanings for British commentators in the 1890s and 1900s (Part 1). Further, by expanding the scope of traditional histories of the Fabian Society, which conventionally operate within political and economic sub-fields and focus on the Society’s ‘official’ literature, to include a close examination of the broader discursive context in which ‘Fabianism’ came into being, this thesis sets out to recover the symbolic aspects of the Fabians’ efforts to negotiate what ‘Fabianism’ meant to the English reading public. The Fabians’ conspicuous leadership in the modern education debates and the liberal fight for a ‘free stage,’ and their solidarity with the international political émigrés living in London at the turn of the twentieth century all contribute to this revised perspective on who the founding Fabians were, what they saw themselves as trying to achieve, and where the Fabian Society belonged—and was perceived to belong—in relation to British politics, culture, and society (Part 2). The original contribution of this thesis is the argument that the Fabians explicitly and implicitly evoked Matthew Arnold as a precursor in their efforts to articulate a kind of Fabian—latterly social-democratic—liberalism and a public vocation that balanced English liberties and the duty of the State to provide the ‘best’ for its citizens in education and in culture, as in politics.
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Sanogo, Ibrahima. "Une analyse compare des pieces de theatre de Jean Anouilh (L'Alouette), de George Bernard Shaw (St. Joan) et D'Andre Obey (La Fenetre)." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 1999. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/dissertations/2204.
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This study compared and analyzed the premises of the three authors and their versions of the life of Joan of Arc. Their presentations enabled us to see the reasons of disparities among the authors' views.
This study has shown that the philosophies of the three authors have different origins, differences which gave a unique slant to their individual interpretations. Their philosophical backgrounds were mainly obtained from diverse sources: published works, unpublished works, and personal interviews of my advisor with Andre Obey, one of the dramatists.
We found in our research that the dramatists' theatrical works represented their own historical understanding of France's medieval heroine. They understood Joan of Arc's story in terms of their own existence and their own interpretations, which were different. The goal of this comparative study was reached through the juxtaposition of these differences.
We concluded that each of the three authors had a unique experience. That uniqueness was articulated to rekindle the remarkable history of Joan of Arc.
In 1750 J.-J. Rousseau advised that we should put a limit on theatrical art, because he said the theater perverts illusion. We used that advice as a yardstick to judge the three plays of the authors. That statement helped us to look at the work of these three playwrights as different chapters in the history of the life of Joan of Arc.
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O'Flaherty, GearoÌid Noel Patrick. "Wilde and Shaw : nationalism, socialism and sexuality : a selective and comparative study of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw's identities, ideologies and contribution to Anglo Irish literature." Thesis, University of Kent, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.252585.
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Spicer, Arwen. "Toward sustainable change : the legacy of William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells in the ecological discourse of contemporary science fiction /." view abstract or download file of text, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3181131.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2005.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 261-272). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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DeMattio, Ashley N. "Under the Influence of Satire." Ohio Dominican University Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oduhonors1368615061.
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Kirksey, Cort H. "Shavian Self-Fashioning: Authorized Biography and Shaw's Superman." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2010. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/2184.
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George Bernard Shaw exercised an above-average level of authorial control, which even extended to his relationship with his biographers. Shaw crafts a persona, with the help of his "authorized" biographer Archibald Henderson, which displays a process of evolutionary development and progress along the lines of the Shavian philosophy of the Life Force and the Superman. In essence, Shaw is casting himself as a prototype for the Superman through the autobiographical manipulation of his biographers and aesthetic modes of self-fashioning.
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Valley, Leslie Ann. "Replacing the Priest: Tradition, Politics, and Religion in Early Modern Irish Drama." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2009. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/1856.
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By the beginning of the twentieth century, Ireland's identity was continually pulled between its loyalties to Catholicism and British imperialism. In response to this conflict of identity, W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory argued the need for an Irish theatre that was demonstrative of the Irish people, returning to the literary traditions to the Celtic heritage. What resulted was a questioning of religion and politics in Ireland, specifically the Catholic Church and its priests. Yeat's own drama removed the priests from the stage and replaced them with characters demonstrative of those literary traditions, establishing what he called a "new priesthood". In response to this removal, Yeat's contemporaries such as J. M. Synge and Bernard Shaw evolved his vision, creating a criticism and, ultimately, a rejection of Irish priests. In doing so, these playwrights created depictions of absent, ineffectual, and pagan priests that have endured throughout the twentieth century.
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Rademaker, Kenneth. "Candida: Shaw’s Presentation of the Roman Catholic “Other”." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1201659739.
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Leadingham, Norma Compton. "Propaganda and Poetry during the Great War." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2008. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/1966.
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During the Great War, poetry played a more significant role in the war effort than articles and pamphlets. A campaign of extraordinary language filled with abstract and spiritualized words and phrases concealed the realities of the War. Archaic language and lofty phrases hid the horrible truth of modern mechanical warfare. The majority and most recognized and admired poets, including those who served on the front and knew firsthand the horrors of trench warfare, not only supported the war effort, but also encouraged its continuation. For the majority of the poets, the rejection of the war was a postwar phenomenon. From the trenches, leading Great War poets; Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Sitwell, and others, learned that the War was neither Agincourt, nor the playing fields of ancient public schools, nor the supreme test of valor but, instead, the modern industrial world in miniature, surely, the modern world at its most horrifying.
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Ashford, Joan Anderson. "Ecocritical Theology Neo-Pastoral Themes in American Fiction from 1960 to the Present." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2009. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/52.
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Ecocritical theology relates to American fiction as it connects nature and spirituality. In my development of the term “neo-pastoral” I begin with Virgil’s Eclogues to serve as examples for spiritual and nature related themes. Virgil’s characters in “The Dispossessed” represent people’s alienation from the land. Meliboeus must leave his homeland because the Roman government has reassigned it to their war veterans. As he leaves Meliboeus wonders why fate has rendered this judgment on him and yet has granted his friend Tityrus a reprieve. Typically, pastoral literature represents people’s longing to leave the city and return to the spiritual respite of the country. When Meliboeus begins his journey he does not travel toward a specific geographical location. Because the gods have forced him from his land and severed his spiritual connection to nature he travels into the unknown. This is the starting point from which I develop neo-pastoral threads in contemporary literature and discuss the alienation that people experience when they are no longer connected to a spirit of the land or genius loci. Neo-pastoralism relates Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope and the expansion of the narrative voice of the novel to include the time/space dialogic. Neo-pastoral fiction shows people in their quest to find spirituality in spite of damage from chemical catastrophic events and suggests they may turn to technology as an ideological base to replace religion. The (anti) heroes of this genre often feel no connection with Judeo-Christian canon yet they do not consider other models of spirituality. Through catastrophes related to the atomic bomb, nuclear waste accidents, and the realization of how chemical pollutants affect the atmosphere, neo-pastoral literature explores the idea of apocalypticism in the event of mass annihilation and the need for canonical reformation. The novels explored in this dissertation are John Updike’s Rabbit, Run; Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer; Don DeLillo’s White Noise; Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead; Toni Morrison’s Paradise; and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
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Wilsey, Shannon K. "Interpretations of Medievalism in the 19th Century: Keats, Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2010. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/20.
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This thesis describes how different 19th century poets and artists depicted elements of the medieval in their artwork as a means to contradict the rapid progress and metropolitan build-up of the Industrial Revolution. The poets discussed are John Keats and Alfred, Lord Tennyson; the painters include William Holman Hunt and John William Waterhouse. Examples of the poems and corresponding Pre-Raphaelite depictions include The Eve of Saint Agnes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci and The Lady of Shalott.
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Soares, Nuno Filipe Gomes. "George Bernard Shaw: Tradução de Getting Married e breve análise biobibliográfica." Dissertação, 2014. https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/handle/10216/77146.
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Soares, Nuno Filipe Gomes. "George Bernard Shaw: Tradução de Getting Married e breve análise biobibliográfica." Master's thesis, 2014. https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/handle/10216/77146.
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Horn, Adam. "Presumption and Despair: The figure of Bernard in Middle English imaginative literature." Thesis, 2021. https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-f5jd-4714.
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This dissertation pursues two distinct but parallel projects in relation to the work of Bernard of Clairvaux and Middle English imaginative literature. First, I argue for a Bernardine anagogical lens as a way to better understand the deepest theological commitments and most distinctive formal innovations of certain key Middle English literary texts, especially Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales. Second, I outline a more genealogical project, tracing the figure of Bernard as it is explicitly invoked in widely circulated Middle English works including Piers, The Parson’s Tale, and the Prick of Conscience.
These two threads connect to suggest that the work of Bernard of Clairvaux can offer a new way to understand the relationship between theological and literary texts in the late Middle Ages. Because Bernard’s influence in the vernacular is as much as matter of style as of content, it requires a more capacious way of theorizing the theological implications and even motivations of literary form. The “figure of Bernard” acts as a cipher for later works to explore their deepest intellectual preoccupations, and makes it possible to trace the way they imagine the anagogical interval between the presence and absence of Christ, the over- and under-estimation of the presence of eternity in time. The Bernardine themes of “presumption” and “despair” serve as a useful shorthand for signaling this theorization, and help me to extend its application beyond texts in which Bernard is explicitly invoked—including to writers, like Chaucer and Thomas Malory, whose work is often assumed to be firmly secular.