Two exiled Irish writers influenced British culture in important ways as the 19th century turned. George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde were both dramatists and polemicists. Shaw was a Dublin-born middle-class Protestant who by the 1920s had worked his way from an apprentice clerkship to a position as one of Europe’s most influential men of letters. Shavian became the adjective used to describe the witty epithets that punctuate Shaw’s writing and serve as the glue that holds together works that could often be didactic and dramatically stilted. Over the course of a long career, Shaw produced some 50 plays, five ...(100 of 10874 words)