ENGL428 -- Major Writers -- George Bernard Shaw

Shaw was a very witty satirist who loved to present people with the absurdity of their conventional way of thinking. His satires range widely over such subjects as heroism in war, physicians and their power over life and death, religion, the battle of the sexes, education, and heaven and hell. The prefaces to many of his plays, besides being examples of a wonderful prose style, are often funnier than the plays themselves. Among the plays to be read in the course: Arms and the Man, Major Barbara, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Androcles and the Lion, Saint Joan, and Man and Superman.