Recent Work on Pygmalion in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Pygmalion, Ovid’s story of the sculptor who falls in love with his own statue, later brought to life by Venus, is a popular subject in English literature. In this essay I review recent work on Pygmalion in 19th-century literature, focusing on the key themes of gender, class and metamorphosis. The literature reviewed includes analyses of specific Pygmalion poems and plays, as well as the use of Pygmalion as a trope for a range of concerns relating to male control, fashioning and the female subject. In the essay I consider Romantic and Victorian versions, as well as early 20th-century texts such as George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912) which I suggest has shaped modern ways of understanding Pygmalionism and transformation