The Genius of George Bernard Shaw is a criticism of George Bernard Shaw's work that explores his art, aesthetics, philosophy, and revolutionary ideas. Shaw wrote his plays raising and dealing with the problems of individuals, families, society, nations, and the world. It is occasionally stated that Shaw's support for totalitarianism grew out of his frustration with nineteenth-century liberalism, which ineffectually culminated in a disastrous world war. Yet, close analysis to two of Shaw's Major Critical Essays from the 1890s shows that even then Shaw expressed a desire for a ruthless man of action unencumbered by the burden of conscience to come on the scene and establish a new world order, to initiate the utopian epoch. Indeed, further analysis of a number of plays from before the war shows the impulse to be persistent and undeniable. Shaw hated disorder, and he wanted to see society managed efficiently by a small caste of technocratic experts who were at the same time, in Karl Popper's memorable phrase, utopian social engineers. He had very little confidence in the average man and woman, who could not work mentally at the same speed‖ as the Fabian executive committee, his ideal of what a ruling caste would look like. Shaw's ideal society, what I am calling his utopian vision, resembles Plato's ideal city or Comte's Religion of Humanity more than any society that has presumably ever existed on earth. This need for absolute order and control found many means of expression in both his life and work and was intricately bound up with his longing for perfection. This book is useful for world teachers, students, and research scholars in English in schools, colleges, universities all over the world.

The Aesthetic and Decadent Movement of the late 19th century spawned the idea of "Art for Art's Sake," challenged aesthetic standards and shocked the bourgeosie. From Walter Pater's study, "The Renaissance to Salome, the truly decadent collaboration between Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, Karl Beckson has chosen a full spectrum of works that chronicle the British artistic achievement of the 1890s. In this revised edition of a classic anthology, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" has been included in its entirety; the bibliography has been completely updated; Professor Beckson's notes and commentary have been expanded from the first edition published in 1966. The so-called Decadent or Aesthetic period remains one of the most interesting in the history of the arts. The poetry and prose of such writers as Yeats, Wilde, Symons, Johnson, Dowson, Barlas, Pater and others are included in this collection, along with sixteen of Aubrey Beardsley's drawings.

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.

This book is an attempt to remedy the neglect of the cultural and aesthetic aspects of English socialism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An outstanding symptom of this neglect is the way in which the Fabian Society, and its two leading lights, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, have usually been depicted as completely indifferent to art and to the artistic ramifications of socialism. Most commentators have painted Fabian socialism as a narrowly utilitarian programme of social and administrative reform, preoccupied with the mechanisms of politics and largely obvious of wider, more 'human' issues. One of the basic aims of the book is to question this bleakly philistine image, by showing the basis of the Fabians' beliefs in romancism as well as utilitarianism.