Gahan Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb on Poverty and Equality in the Modern World, 1905–1914

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-3-319-48442-6
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 219 Seiten, eBook

Reihe: Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries

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.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gahan, Peter

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1. 1884-1904, Introduction.- Chapter 2. 1905, Poverty, Salvation, and the Poor Law Commission.- Chapter 3. 1905-1909, Noises Off.- Chapter 4. 1909, The Minority Report.- Chapter 5. 1910, Campaign for the Prevention of Destitution.- Chapter 6. 1911, Travels.- Chapter 7. 1912, War on Poverty.- Chapter 8. 1913, The New Statesman and the Fabian Research Department.- Chapter 9. 1914, Redistribution and War.- Chapter 10.1915-1950, Epilogue.- Bibliography.

Über Autor(innen)

Peter Gahan is an independent scholar. He graduated in Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. He has written the book 
Shaw Shadows: Rereading the Texts of Bernard Shaw
 (2004), an introduction to the 2006 Penguin edition of Shaw’s
Candida
and edited the volume 
Shaw and The Irish Literary Tradition
 (2010). Having served for several years on the editorial board of
SHAW: the Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies
, he is currently co-editor of Palgrave Macmillan’s
Bernard Shaw and his Contemporaries
series.