It has taken a while for Irish studies to catch up with modernity’s most notorious philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. Although his importance for Yeats has been discussed elsewhere and he is often name-checked in short essays and footnotes, no full-length examination of Nietzsche’s significance for Irish letters has been considered before Patrick Bixby has, thankfully, broached the subject with this book. His approach, perhaps wise, is not head-on but via modernist rebellion, mobilizing the dark kudos of Nietzschean influence: what Bixby describes as his “black market cultural capital” (14).
As Bixby explains, in the mid-1890s George Bernard Shaw welcomed Nietzsche into the fold of late Victorian rebels as a “Devil’s Advocate of the modern type” (quoted in Bixby 25), having been alerted to his presence (along with everyone else) by Max Nordau’s blockbuster attack on such delinquency, Degeneration (1892). There could be no better credentials. Here, Shaw recognized, was a like-minded...
