Bernard Shaw and the Comic Sublime

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This book discovers in the imaginative life of the Shavian oeuvre a mythology of self, of which the political and social themes are aspects. Understanding the sublime as the modes of self-transcedence sought by an authorial will and comic as the resistances to these, Gordon shows how their interaction creates characteristic dramatic effects. In his style of analysis, genres like romance and comedy become psychological acts as well as conventional forms. In a theoretical first chapter, the author makes use of such psychoanalytic concepts as repression, sublimation, and narcissism to probe the dynamics of the comic sublime and to deepen Shaw’s place in his cultural situation. He then traces an individual career, offering readings of texts. David J.Gordon also wrote D.H.Lawrence as a Literary Critic and Literary Art and the Unconscious .