Article
George Bernard Shaw is considered a literary classic writer in Hungarian. This statement serves as the hypothesis of the article which examines Shaw’s reception in Hungary from 1956 to the present. Arms and the Man (1893) was the first play performed in Hungary in 1904 which firmly set Shaw in the Hungarian literary canon. There are three volumes devoted entirely to Shaw (Marcell Benedek: G. B. Shaw, 1963; Géza Hegedüs: The World of G. B. Shaw, 1970; and István Pálffy: George Bernard Shaw in Hungary, 1987) 1 , which were published a decade apart; all three were published before the change of regime in Hungary in 1989. No critical study on Shaw was published in Hungarian between 2008 and the present, therefore the canonisation gesture was not strengthened. Many critical studies, however, were produced in the last two decades, which led to a significant paradigm shift in the reception of Shaw in Hungary. This paradigm shift reflects a different approach to Shaw scholarship today.
