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TABLE OF CONTENTS |
WORKS ON SHAW ☼ |
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The Shaw shelf, so to speak, will never surpass the
Shakespeare shelf in terms of either sheer weight or number of volumes, but in
the field of drama written in English it may have achieved a respectable second
place, not bad considering what a relative latecomer Shaw is to that
field. If you will look through the
next section of links on the ISS website where bibliographies are listed, under
“Research Aids,” they
will give you some sense of the vastness of the writing on Shaw, mostly
critical/biographical/historical, some journalistic/epistolary, and some even
fictional. Below are some of the
primary categories, generally considered, clicking on which will take you to
places where you can purchase or in some cases view works online. For specific suggestions for biographies and other
kinds of books, go to www.shawsociety.org/research.htm.
There
are new books on Shaw coming out all the time, paperback and hardbound, which
ISS members often receive email notification of, and for that look in Books in Print, but of course the greatest
amount of books are no longer in print and are to be found in the “used” (or
should we say “previously owned”) category, and there you’ll have to fall back
on your hunting and gathering instincts.
Look under “Bibliographies” in the “RESEARCH
AIDS” section of the ISS homepage for suggestions. If you have the name of an author or part of
the title of a book, often an online search will bear fruit, with amazon.com
being perhaps the first place to look.
Otherwise just do general searches for G. B. Shaw, George Bernard Shaw,
G. Bernard Shaw, Bernard Shaw, and GBS, and you’ll find lots to choose
from. There used to be many wonderful
book shops in the real world that kept large Shaw collections (I used to never
miss Foyle’s when visiting London), but such are
slowly disappearing, and anyway you’re just as likely to reach them online
these days. eBay
is sometimes a good source for the rarer sort of books, if you like
auctioning. Of course almost all
university libraries have large Shaw offerings, and some university and other
public libraries even have special collections of Shaw material. For a list of those collections, see SHAW 20
or click on the “Collections” link under “RESEARCH AIDS”
on the ISS homepage. It’s
rare to find a whole book that can be read online, but there is one entitled British Drama: 1890 to 1950, A Critical
History, which has much to say about Shaw and his period, and that can be
reached at http://www.rfd2.net/britishdrama.htm.
RECENT BOOKS ON SHAW:
1. Bernard F Dukore’s Bernard Shaw:
Slaves of Duty & Tricks of the Governing Class.
To
purchase, see http://www.amazon.com/Bernard-Shaw-Slaves-Tricks-Governing/dp/0944318460/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348684507&sr=1-1&keywords=shaw+slaves+duty+tricks
.
The most
likely place to find books recently printed is in any Shaw Series that comes
along. Mention was made in the “Works by Shaw” section
on the ISS homepage of a Shaw correspondence series published by the U. of
Toronto Press, but these books contain mostly work by Shaw; the only Shaw Series that publishes books on Shaw is the University Press of Florida Shaw Series, and
ISS members who possess the code word (available on the members’ page) can get
a 40% discount on purchases. Click here to go to the
series website. An ISS membership application is available at
www.shawsociety.org/2012-membership-form.htm .
Individual
articles on Shaw have appeared n a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers,
collections, etc., over the years and keep appearing, and you should consult
the bibliographies mentioned in the “RESEARCH AIDS” section of
links on the ISS homepage for a pretty thorough accounting of them. Here we’ll just mention the articles in journals that are dedicated to
Shaw.
Not long after the first Shaw Society was formed in 1941 in London, England, this group began publishing a
thin paperback called The Shavian, which
still continues and can be found in some libraries, although it’s hard to find
a complete collection, and there are a few gaps. When the Bernard Shaw Society was founded in New York later in the 1940s, this
group produced another thin paperback called The Independent
Shavian, which still continues and also may be found in some
libraries. Both of these journals,
although full of fascinating commentary and history, are essentially house
organs and the articles are not peer reviewed.
The only Shaw journal that is sufficiently peer-reviewed to acquire the
academic respectability needed for listing in the MLA annual bibliography is a
journal that was established independently of any society (although it is now
offered at a discount by the International Shaw Society as a feature of
membership) and was edited for many years by Stanley Weintraub (now edited by
Michael Pharand). It began as a
paperback quarterly named The Shaw Review
and has continued since 1980 as a very substantial hardbound called SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies (often abbreviated
to just SHAW followed by the volume #, as in SHAW 32, due out in 2012). To receive The Shavian or The
Independent Shavian, you have to become members of The Shaw Society in the first case and of The Bernard Shaw Society in the second case.
SHAW, on the other hand, can be purchased directly from Penn State U.
Press at the trade price (Click Here) or at a substantial discount through membership in
the ISS (Click Here).
4.) PROJECT MUSE (for access to journals)
“Project Muse” is an online database of more than 200 journals from nonprofit publishers,
to be found at http://muse.jhu.edu. Many major libraries have access to it
through subscriptions, and the ISS has access to it through a code that is
given to members when they pay their dues.
The journal SHAW, for example, is available for reading online from the
2000 volume on.
An unusual way of commenting on an author is by including
him as an actual or referred character in a fictional work such as a play,
story, or poem. To see the history of Shaw’s treatment as a
fictionalized character and to read contemporary examples of this,
please go to https://shawsociety.org/Fictional-Shaw.htm.
Webmaster: RFD (dietrich@usf.edu)
