Special Issue: SHAW 44.1 (June 2024): VICTORIAN SHAW
The Victorian era, usually defined as the period between 1837 and 1901, has been variously characterized as a time of breakneck scientific progress and rigid tradition, of widening democracy and insular hierarchy, of imperial expansion and the cult of domesticity. Bernard Shaw’s relationship with the era has been similarly argued over. Born twenty years into Queen Victoria’s reign and remaining active and prolific nearly half a century beyond its end, he has been described both as a product of Victorianism and as a rebel against it, an irrepressible herald of the Modern period. Howard Mumford Jones, a few years after Shaw’s death, called him an exemplar of “the energy, the fecundity, the curiosity of the great Victorians”; yet Stanley Kauffmann, a few decades later, would declare of Shaw’s nineteenth-century contemporaries that “their energy seems concentric, whirling in a closed circle around their lives and era,” while with Shaw, “the energy seems to whirl forward, to burst continually into a succession of futures.” Taking these varying judgments as a point of departure, SHAW 44.1 will focus on the theme of “Victorian Shaw.”
This special issue welcomes articles that analyze Shaw’s connections or responses to particular people, events, texts, artistic works, or movements of the Victorian period, as well as articles that more broadly assess Shaw’s role in the field of Victorian Studies. Please submit essays by 1 May 2023. Inquiries and proposals should be directed to guest editor Mary Christian at mary.christian@mga.edu. Instructions for submitting manuscripts can be found at https://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_shaw.html.