Bernard Shaw in Contemporary Irish Studies: 'Passé and Contemptible'?

There will no doubt be abuses in Ireland under Home Rule that do not exist under English rule. —Bernard Shaw, ‘‘Preface for Politicians,’’ John Bull’s Other Island [Shaw understood] that Irish modernity was precisely a condition in which the ‘‘cultural’’ view of ‘‘tradition’’ and the ‘‘economic’’ view of capital development were joined in unequal combat. —Seamus Deane, ‘‘Dumbness and Eloquence: A Note on English as We Write It in Ireland,’’ in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Clare Carroll and Patricia King Bernard Shaw’s works are most productively understood as artifacts of a sustained, unrivaled, public intellectual engagement with Ireland and the world. In this, Shaw anticipates precisely the kind of critical and creative range demanded in our own day, and his outputs and practices should be studied for the insights and dilemmas to which they draw attention. Gerry Smith’s (1998) desideratum for Irish critical practice might have been formulated with Shaw in mind: ‘‘As a discrete, autonomous, intellectual practice, criticism’s function should be to understand and describe those particular local, national myths by the light of the larger, international, universal truth of social justice.’’ 1 Shaw dealt with big questions, and returned constantly to them, refining his own position, as the revised and revisited prefaces to John Bull’s Other Island demonstrate. For anyone reflecting on the significance of his works, this creates opportunities and problems, and the structure of what follows reflects this. My essay is organized around an attempt to sketch answers to three principal questions: How does Shaw sit in Irish Studies? In what ways is Ireland—the object of study—changing, and how does Irish Studies engage with or ignore these