Analysis Of Pygmalion By George Bernard Shaw From The Perspective Of Myth-archetypal Criticism

George Bernard Shaw is one of the most outstanding realistic playwrights in the field of literature.Moreover,he is also a famous master of humor and satire in play writing.Bernard Shaw's masterpiece Pygmalion tells a story about how a phonetics professor Henry Higgins trains a poor flower girl Eliza into a fake decent upper-class lady successfully and the flower girl is approved by the society ultimately.Pygmalion has been researched in many fields,including pragmatics,social linguistics,Fabianism,translation and so on but hardly studied from the perspective of archetypal criticism.Myth-archetypal criticism plays an important role in literature research in the 20 th century,which has provided a new field and method for literary criticizing.Moreover,many scholars have done a lot of novel studies by adopting myth-archetypal criticism.The application of myth-archetypal criticism has hardly been seen in previous researches of Pygmalion,which is the significance and focus of this thesis.This thesis attempts to analyze Pygmalion by applying archetypal criticism in four aspects: Firstly,the mythological archetypes and narrative patterns will be abstracted from the play;secondly,archetypal images and motifs embodied in most literary works are reflected in the play;thirdly,two kinds of archetypal structures are analyzed in the study and the fourth is that significance of applying archetypal criticism into this play will be summarized.Six parts constitute the main body of the thesis.With the first part as an introduction to the writer and his works,research significance and thesis structure are also included.Chapter two deals with literature reviews abroad and at home.Chapter three is the illustration of the three research foundations of archetypal criticism.Chapter four includes a detailed analysis of the archetypal narrative patterns and characters separately.Chapter five is the analysis of the archetypal images,motifs and archetypal structures that reflected in the work.Chapter six serves as the conclusion part.Analyzing and appreciating Pygmalion from the perspective of archetypal criticism proves not only the importance of this study,but also testifies that literary works can be the creation of displacement of legendary archetypes.