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The Quintessence of Ibsenism

George Bernard Shaw

Book Overview: 

George Bernard Shaw, a playwright with a few bones to pick of his own, undertakes a surgical analysis of the social philosophies underlying the work of Henrik Ibsen. Focusing his analysis on Ibsen's challenge to the conventional "ideals" which both Ibsen and Shaw consider the greatest evils in human society, Shaw summarizes and exposits sixteen of Ibsen's plays, seizing the opportunity to elucidate some of the principles dearest to himself. Some of the most striking passages reveal Shaw's radical feminist perspectives, some of which resonate as if a half-century ahead of their time. A fascinating revelation of the minds of two great and revolutionary writers (it's not always obvious whose voice is exactly whose), this always-timely book exposes hypocrisies still poisoning Society in the twenty-first century.

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Community Reviews

George Bernard Shaw, like his contemporary G.K. Chesterton, was a great polemicist in the early decades of the 20th century, something he usually channelled into the prefaces to his plays. But here he has written a polemical book as a discussion of Ibsen's plays. He is very up-front about the purpos

George Bernard Shaw's The Quintessence of Ibsenism is a witty collection of aphorisms and short analyses of Henrik Ibsen's plays. The edition I read is dated 1922, after Ibsen had died and the First World War had been fought.

This is the reason I fell in love with Shaw. I was introduced to Arns and the Man, and thought it was alright. I chose it for a school project (because it was short and I was a lazy teen) and discovered the true meaning for the play - class warfare and all that good stuff. I quickly picked up anyt

If it were just a lucid discussion of the themes in Henrik Ibsen's work this book would be well worth reading, but it is far more than that: It is a surgically precise decomposition of the perils of Idealism.

Of course the irony is that no idealist would read this and instead each will continue to de

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