Pygmalion's Wordplay

In this treatment of Bernard Shaw as a postmodern writer, the author offers a fresh interpretation of ""Pygmalion"", one of Shaw's most enduring plays. Challenging widely held assumptions about Shaw, she maintains that he critiqued conventional notions about language and psychology long before such iconoclasts as Jacques Derrida and James Hillman came on the scene. Reynolds calls ""Pygmalion"" ""the Shavian creation myth"" and compares Henry Higgins's struggle to transform a bedraggled flower girl into a duchess to Shaw's reinvention of himself as the larger-than-life G.B.S. who entertained and edified an immense readership. Reynolds argues that long before Derrida, Karl Marx's ideas about language were a powerful influence on Shaw. In ""Pygmalion"", Shaw topples the ""binary oppositions"", as Derrida calls them, that characterize Western thought: essence versus appearance, speech versus writing, authenticity versus performance. ""Pygmalion's Wordplay"" seeks to reveal an unexpected side of Shaw - his acute insight into linguistic and psychological concepts that dominate postmodern thought - that will be provocative to Shavians and Derrideans alike.