Book Description

In the five novels he wrote before he became the great Irish playwright everyone knows, George Bernard Shaw worked out the basic design of his public future, fulfilling his own dictum that "no man is real until he has been transmuted into a work of art." R. F. Dietrich stresses Shaw's psychic transformation from a shy, priggish, inept Shelleyan intellectual to an efficient, extroverted, ironically devilish statesman-poet. Amid the decay and death of the old Victorian father figures, the young genius discovers, as James Joyce did later, that he must commit autogenesis and re-create himself as his own authority figure. In the moral and spiritual emptiness of the modern world, Shaw engendered the inherently moral "Superman," who would triumph over circumstances by being a master rather than a slave of reality. Reflecting contemporary critical theory and advances in Shaw studies, this work is a major overhaul of Dietrich's earlier study of Shaw's transformation, going beyond the merely biographical to examine the psychological and symbolic significance of Shaw's fiction. It will be of interest not only to Shaw scholars but to historians of the novel (the Victorian novel in particular), to historians of culture, and to those interested in the psychology and biography of authors and public figures.