This book traces the effects of materiality – including money and its opposite, poverty – on the psychical lives of George Bernard Shaw and his characters. While this study focuses on the protagonists of the five novels Shaw wrote in the late 1870s and early 1880s, it also explores how materialism, feeling, and emotion are linked throughout his entire canon. At the same time, it demonstrates how Shaw’s conceptions of human subjectivity parallel those of two of his contemporaries, Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel. In particular, this book explores how theories of so-called ‘marginal economics’ influence fin de siècle thought about human psychology and the sociology of the modern metropolis, particularly London.
Table of Content
1. Introduction: On Money, Psychology, and Affect in Bernard Shaw’s Writing.- 2. The Materialist Dream Theatre: Affect and Value, Freud and Simmel.- 3. Unashamed: Negative Affect, Money, and Performance in Immaturity and The Irrational Knot.- 4. Entr’acte at the Theatre: Marriage, Money, and Desire in Love Among the Artists.- 5. Cashel Byron’s Blush—and Others.- 6. The Antinomies of An Unsocial Socialist.- 7. Postscript: Embodied Shaws.
About the author
Stephen Watt is Provost Professor of English and former Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University in Bloomington, USA. His most recent books include
“Something Dreadful and Grand”: American Literature and the Irish-Jewish Unconscious (2015) and
Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing (2009).
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