Bloom's Modern Critical Views - George Bernard Shaw (2010) (197p) [Inua].pdf

George Bernard Shaw (Bloom's Modern Critical Views) Library Binding – October, 2010
by Harold Bloom (Editor)

Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Library Binding: 188 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L); New edition (October 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1604138823
ISBN-13: 978-1604138825

Editor’s Note
My introduction, which considers Shaw’s copious intellectual debts, offers critical readings of Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, and Saint Joan, in the hope of arriving at a freshly balanced estimate both of Shaw’s limitations and of his varied achievement as a comic melodramatist.
John A. Bertolini marks Saint Joan as a new phase in Shaw’s preoccupation with the workings of the imagination, after which Jean Reynolds borrows Eric Bentley’s phrase “Shavian inclusiveness” to explore elements of postmodernism in the plays.
Celia Marshik traces Pygmalion’s long journey to the page and stage, locating the comedy within the context of turn-of-the-century purity move- ments. Stuart E. Baker identifies Major Barbara as containing the fullest expression of Shavian philosophy and dramatic method.
Lagretta Tallent Lenker considers Shaw’s varied and contradictory ideas about war, followed by Jan McDonald’s appraisal of Shaw’s views of art and artists as expressed in the plays.
Michael Goldman grapples with the relationship between style and ideology in the plays and the influence of Shaw’s evolving critical reputation. Emil Roy concludes the volume by comparing the implosive comedy of Heartbreak House with Pinter’s The Homecoming.