Widower's House

Widower's House

Author: John Bayley

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780393025613

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The widower of the novelist Iris Murdoch, a retired Oxford U. English professor and eminent author himself (Bayley's Eulogy for Iris was a bestseller), candidly relates how he dealt with his wife's Alzheimer's, her death in 1999, friends' responses, and a new lifestyle and love in his mid-seventies. c. Book News Inc.


Plays by George Bernard Shaw

Plays by George Bernard Shaw

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2004-08-03

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 1101157666

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George Bernard Shaw demanded truth and despised convention. He punctured hollow pretensions and smug prudishness—coating his criticism with ingenious and irreverent wit. In Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida, and Man and Superman, the great playwright satirizes society, military heroism, marriage, and the pursuit of man by woman. From a social, literary, and theatrical standpoint, these four plays are among the foremost dramas of the age—as intellectually stimulating as they are thoroughly enjoyable. “My way of joking is to tell the truth: It is the funniest joke in the world.”—G. B. Shaw With an Introduction by Eric Bentley and an Afterword by Norman Lloyd


Shaw's Settings

Shaw's Settings

Author: Tony J. Stafford

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 0813048559

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Picture the young George Bernard Shaw spending long days in the Reading Room of the British Museum, pursuing a self-taught education, all the while longing for the green landscapes of his native Ireland. It is no coincidence that gardens and libraries often set the scene for Shaw's plays, yet scholars have seldom drawn attention to the fact until now. Exposing the subtle interplay of these two settings as a key pattern throughout Shaw’s dramas, Shaw's Settings fills the need for a systematic study of setting as significant to the playwright's work as a whole. Each of the nine chapters focuses on a different play and a different usage of gardens and libraries, showing that these venues are not just background for action, they also serve as metaphors, foreshadowing, and insight into characters and conflicts. The vital role of Shaw's settings reveals the astonishing depth and complexity of the playwright's dramatic genius.


The Philanderer

The Philanderer

Author: Bernard Shaw

Publisher: Broadview Press

Published: 2015-05-21

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1554812631

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The second of Shaw’s “unpleasant” plays, written in 1893, published in 1898, but not performed until 1905, The Philanderer is subtitled “A Topical Comedy.” The eclectic range of topical subjects addressed in the play includes the influence of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen on British middle-class social mores (the second act of The Philanderer is set in the fictional Ibsen Club), medical follies, the rise of the “New Woman,” and, in particular, the destructive impact of Victorian marriage and divorce laws. Just as Shaw’s other “unpleasant” plays, Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession, call, respectively, for reform of laws that allow corrupt property owners to exploit the poor and for radical change to economic structures that drive women into prostitution, so The Philanderer makes the case for more liberal legislation to allow easier divorce—particularly for women—when marriages become irretrievably broken. Shaw’s attack on divorce laws becomes even clearer and stronger in the final act that he wrote for the play but discarded in favour of the version he published. The discarded version is published for the first time in this Broadview edition of the play.


The Widower's Tale

The Widower's Tale

Author: Julia Glass

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2011-07-12

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 0307456102

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the National Book Award–winning author of Three Junes: Seventy-year-old Percy Darling is settling happily into retirement—reading novels, watching old movies, and swimming naked in his pond. But his routines are disrupted when he is persuaded to let a locally beloved preschool take over his barn. As Percy sees his rural refuge overrun by children, parents, and teachers, he must reexamine the solitary life he has made in the three decades since the sudden death of his wife. With equal parts affection and humor, Julia Glass spins a captivating tale about a man who can no longer remain aloof from his community, his two grown daughters, or—to his great shock—the precarious joy of falling in love.


Shaw

Shaw

Author: A M Gibbs

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1990-06-14

Total Pages: 574

ISBN-13: 134905402X

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Bernard Shaw

Bernard Shaw

Author: Stanley Weintraub

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 1988-06-01

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 0271026723

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This is the first comprehensive annotated bibliography of works by and about Bernard Shaw. No book has appeared before that has surveyed all of the research and writing that the life and work of Bernard Shaw have evoked. The greatest dramaturgist in English after Shakespeare, Shaw was one of the dominant public figures of his time, a long lifetime (1856-1950) that began in the mid-Victorian period and extended into the Atomic Age. Inevitably, someone who straddled his age so visibly and so memorably, and whose works retain a continuing fascination, has been the subject of thousands of articles and hundreds of books, from criticism of individual works to multivolume biographies, editions, and studies. Stanley Weintraub has distilled his forty years of experience of Shaw studies to bring them into useful focus and sort out the significant writings from the burgeoning mass of publications. This book is an essential tool for both scholars and general readers interested in the multifarious world of Shaw. Readers will not only find out what has been done, but what still remains to be accomplished in Shaw studies; what Shaw's influence has been on other writers; even where Shaw has appeared as a character in other writers' poetry, fiction, and drama.


A Bernard Shaw Chronology

A Bernard Shaw Chronology

Author: A. Gibbs

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2001-02-14

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 0230599583

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A.M. Gibbs provides an authoritative and comprehensive account of the life, career and associations of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), one of the most eminent and influential literary figures of the modern age. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished material, this work illuminates the complex fabric of Shaw's extraordinary career as playwright, novelist, critic, orator, political activist, social commentator, avant-garde thinker and controversialist. Images of Shaw's daily private life, and of his tangled love affairs, flirtations and friendships, are intertwined with the records of his prodigiously productive career as public figure and creative writer, in a fully documented study which is both a scholarly resource and a lively biographical portrait. An introductory chapter explores theoretical issues in biography raised by the chronology form; and a chapter on Shaw's ancestry and family supplies new evidence about his Irish background. A Who's Who section contains thumbnail sketches of over two hundred contemporaries of Shaw who had significant associations with him.