Introduction

The introduction identifies the “other revolutions”—the sexual revolution, the socialist revolution, and the ‘free theater’ revolution—that came together in London in the 1890s as the first wave of modern Irish playwrights sought to prove themselves on the London stage. The introduction also explains and justifies the book’s theoretical paradigm and methodologies, arguing for the importance of reading social politics and sexual politics together. It identifies some of the limitations of the “global turn” and its dependence on evolutionary and market-theory based conceptions of “world literature,” arguing that these paradigms obscure the existence of the intentionally anticapitalist systems of exchange that sustained left theater during the period under investigation. It makes the case for reading the intersection of Irish drama and utopian socialism through queer theory, based on their shared ambivalence about what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism,” and draws on the work of Jose Munoz, J. J. Halberstam, and Natalie Melas to elaborate a comparative paradigm which is not defined by developmental logic or capitalist conceptions of value. It argues for the necessity of treating socialism as an embodied praxis, especially in the Irish context. It concludes with summaries of the five chapters and the epilogue.