The Individual Against the Void: Existential and Modernist Undercurrents in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and Shaw’s Saint Joan

This study examines the representation of the isolated individual in An Enemy of the People and Saint Joan as a site of existential and modernist tension. Based on the hypothetical contention that An Enemy of the People and Saint Joan articulate early existential and modernist undercurrents through their representation of the isolated individual in conflict with society, the article examines the representation of individual resistance within destabilized moral and institutional frameworks in the plays under study. It argues that Henrik Ibsen frames individual isolation as a protoexistential response to the rejection of objective moral truth, while George Bernard Shaw situates it within a modernist framework shaped by historical contingency and institutional mediation of meaning. Grounded in a hybrid theoretical framework combining proto-existential dramatic theory, modernist epistemological critique, and late realist dramaturgical transition theory, the study explores how both plays construct authority, resistance, and alienation, and how these dynamics reconfigure the relationship between individual conviction and social legitimacy. It further contends that the texts anticipate existential concerns with responsibility and subjectivity, alongside modernist preoccupations with fragmentation, irony, and epistemic instability, thereby positioning them as transitional works between realist drama and twentieth-century philosophical modernism.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.