"There have been, up to now, only three [Shaw studies] that I would ever recommend particularly to anyone who asked me which are the best to read. I am prepared to enlarge that number to four, and to recommend Dietrich's as the first of the four to be read if the other three are to be fully appreciated. . . . Imaginatively--sagaciously--conceived."
--Dan H. Laurence, literary adviser, Shaw estate, 1973-90
In the five novels George Bernard Shaw wrote before he became the great Irish playwright everyone knows, 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."
In this work, R. F. Dietrich demonstrates how Shaw projected into his novels an attempt to resolve an early crisis of identity and at the same time triumph over a hostile, discouraging world. The novels show how, in escaping a personality he didn't find effective in dealing with that world, Shaw experimentally created the person he became, how he molded the soft clay of immaturity into the man and "Superman" that everyone took for granted in the later Shaw.
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.
Richard Farr Dietrich is professor of English at the University of South Florida. In addition to publishing many articles on Shaw and other 20th-century figures, he is the author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Superman: A Study of Shaw's Novels (UPF, 1969) and of British Drama 1890-1950: A Critical History and the editor of Shaw's novel An Unsocial Socialist.
