European University Institute Library

Bernard Shaw and totalitarianism, longing for utopia, Matthew Yde

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 228-235) and index

index present

non fiction

Bernard Shaw and totalitarianism

bibliography

842208545

Matthew Yde

longing for utopia

George Bernard Shaw died on 2 November 1950, a little over three months past his ninety-fourth birthday. His wife had died seven years before and his oldest friend and Fabian associate, Sidney Webb, three years earlier. Born in 1856 at the height of the Victorian Age, Shaw lived through the passing of the Victorian and Edwardian years, the two World Wars, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, and the implementation of the Welfare State in England. Ironically, after the implementation of the Welfare State that he had worked for all his life, Shaw became obsessed with the idea that he was being taxed into penury. Nor was this his only mania. He was also obsessed with what he felt was the prodigious waste of time that accrued from using the twenty-six-letter alphabet, and was assiduous in his campaign to have it replaced by a phonetic alphabet of at least forty letters: He calculated that, in writing and printing superfluous letters, our 'ancient Phoenician alphabet' cost us the price of a fleet of battleships every year. At his death his Will provided a significant portion of his income to the establishment of a fund to create a new English alphabet along with the translation of a number of literary classics, including two plays of his own, to demonstrate its effectiveness. Additionally, the ideas that had preoccupied him for at least half a century<U+0127> particularly the theory of Creative Evolution and the movement of the species toward omniscience and omnipotence<U+0127> remained unaltered by the recent disaster of the war --, Provided by Publisher

Introduction: George Bernard Shaw: revolutionary playwright -- Previsions of the Superman in the coming age of will: the quintessence of Ibsenism -- Utopia in flames: Shaw and Wagner's Ring: the perfect Wagnerite -- From hell to heaven: creative evolution and the drive towards the military-industrial-religious complex: Man and superman, John Bull's other island, Major Barbara -- Shaw's modern utopia: Back to Methuselah -- Shaw's totalitarian drama of the thirties; or, Shaw and the dictators: Geneva, The millionairess, The simpleton of the unexpected isles -- George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950, utopian to the end: farfetched fables -- Epilogue