| Narrative has been concerned with issues of selfhood and identity, internal and external, considering the individual life in its relationships to the neighborhoods and the whole society. In the circle of literature of the nineteenth-century, identity was ontological,sociological and therefore an individual's self was a real and knowable entity. All of these formed a"fiction of the reality"contrasting to the"fiction of the fictive"of the twentieth century. The latter fiction resulted from a literary shift to a focus on epistemology, considering more with how reality is known and thus how it is constructed.George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion provides an example of both types of narrative, and thus Shaw's identity construction provides a bridge for the two types of fiction for later narrativists who also examine the formation of identity concerning the Pygmalion figure. In transforming Ovid's story of physical creation into Shaw's story of psychological creation, Shaw and his adherents examine a large amount of issues related to identity creation. For instance, the sociological category of issues includes the formation of one character by another, in particular with respect to group identity; the aesthetic category examines identity-creation as a theatrical or role-playing situation; the philosophical category encompasses the problems of reality and identity, questioning the nature of actuality versus perception, testing reality and the factors involved in the incognito life.This thesis falls into five parts. There is an introduction before chapter one, in which the writer introduce the present academic conditions on the topic all over the world, some related background to narrative, fiction, play, Victorianism and Modernism to prepare for the following argument. Chapter one will argue George Bernard Shaw's narrative, modernism, his scenario of Pygmalion and demonstrate the ways of his transforming Ovid's Metamorphoses, making Shaw a focal point when examining the transformation of Pygmalion for later literary masters. Chapter two follows the Shavian transformation of Ovid's work through a further permutation in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. This chapter also examines in more detail the three categories of the Pygmalion project as they are worked out in The Good Soldier. Chapter three expounds Twentieth-century critics and narrativists seem willing to further Shaw's project, exploring the nature of identity and the persistence of Pygmalion, such as J. Hillis Miller, John Fowles and Muriel Spark. In the end, a conclusion illustrates the Twentieth-century narratives such as these resound with echoes of Pygmalion and Galatea, of identity creation and change, of the usurpation of divine power, and of George Bernard Shaw. |
