Major Barbara Criticism

This Study Guide consists of approximately 51 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Major Barbara.

Major Barbara Criticism

This Study Guide consists of approximately 51 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Major Barbara.
This section contains 857 words
(approx. 3 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Major Barbara Study Guide

In the second volume of his biography, Bernard Shaw, Michael Holroyd writes of early reactions to Major Barbara's first production, focusing on the fact that, as Holroyd puts it, "The critics were impressively divided." Holroyd quotes one reviewer who spoke of the play's "religious passion," as well as another who called Shaw "destitute of the religious emotion," and a third who suggested that Major Barbara's "offences against good taste and good feeling" should have resulted in the play's censorship. Shaw, Holroyd writes, was accused of "deliberate perversity" and praised for his "sense of spiritual beauty." He was called "a high genius" as well as "a writer whose absence of feeling makes him a very unsafe guide." While the play no longer faces charges of blasphemy or immorality, It continues to be controversial. Much of that controversy revolves around the seeming ambiguity of Shaw's purpose. As Harold...

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This section contains 857 words
(approx. 3 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Major Barbara Study Guide
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Major Barbara from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.