"Pygmalion": 155 (Twayne's Masterwork Studies) - Hardcover

Berst, Charles A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805794476 ISBN 13: 9780805794472

Publisher: Twayne Publishers Inc.,U.S., 1995

Synopsis

Series Editor: Robert Lecker, McGill University.Written in an easy-to-read, accessible style by teachers with years of classroom experience, MASTERWORK STUDIES are guides to the literary works most frequently studied in high school. Presenting ideas that spark imaginations, these books help students to gain background knowledge on great literature useful for papers and exams. The goal of each study is to encourage creative thinking by presenting engaging information about each work and its author. This approach allows students to arrive at sound analyses of their own, based on in-depth studies of popular literature. Each volume: illuminates themes and concepts of a classic text; uses clear, conversational language; is an accessible, manageable length from 140 to 170 pages; includes a chronology of the authors life and era; provides an overview of the historical context; offers a summary of its critical reception; and lists primary and secondary sources and index.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Berst is a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles.

From the Back Cover

The immensely popular and durable Pygmalion has long been familiar to readers and audiences as a unique combination and reworking of two well-known stories, Ovid's telling of the Pygmalion myth and Charles Perrault's "Cinderella". According to Berst, Shaw's heartily derivative play is well on its way to assuming a "major place in the mythic tradition" alongside these two classics. As he accompanies the reader through each of the play's five acts, Berst illumines not only Shaw's understanding of the mythic power of the Pygmalion and Cinderella stories but also the striking departures he took from them. What results is new insight into the theatrical skill that has made Shaw, in the eyes of many, the greatest English playwright after Shakespeare. Just as "Perrault makes Cinderella's growth from a girl to a woman more important than the hocus-pocus of her transformation", Berst views the spiritual themes in Pygmalion, played out in Eliza's evolution, as the richest, most enduring locus of Shaw's thematic intentions. In comparing the different versions of the play - Shaw's original script, his later revisions, his script for the film version, and the My Fair Lady script - Berst gives us an unprecedented and detailed overview of those intentions. Maddeningly, Shaw saw his "romance" transformed by many directors into a simplistic love story coupling Higgins and Eliza at the end. Berst's account of Shaw's exasperated efforts to thwart such stagings of Pygmalion - he tried, often unsuccessfully, to forbid "any suggestion that the middle-aged bully and the girl of eighteen are lovers" - is highly entertaining and bemusing.

Edition details

• Publisher: Twayne Publishers Inc.,U.S.
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805794476
• ISBN 13: 9780805794472
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 250