A confirmed bachelor is pursued by a determined woman embodying the Life Force, framed by a dream debate in Hell. Shaw's comedy of ideas about sex and evolution.
Books mentioned in Man and Superman (7)
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Mozart's is the last of the true Don Juans; for by the time he was of age, his cousin Faust had, in the hands of Goethe, taken his place and carried both his warfare and his reconciliation with the gods far beyond mere lovemaking into politics, high art, schemes for reclaiming new continents from…”
Inferno by Dante Alighieri: “I have enjoyed, too, my rests, my recuperations, my breathing times, my very prostrations after strife; but rather would I be dragged through all the circles of the foolish Italian's Inferno than through the pleasures of Europe.”
Everyman by Philip Roth: “Ann was suggested to me by the fifteenth century Dutch morality called Everyman, which Mr William Poel has lately resuscitated so triumphantly.”
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes: “When his swagger is exhausted he drivels into erotic poetry or sentimental uxoriousness; and the Tennysonian King Arthur posing as Guinevere becomes Don Quixote grovelling before Dulcinea.”
Henry V by William Shakespeare: “…actions are forced on them from without, and the external force is grotesquely inappropriate except when it is quite conventional, as in the case of Henry V.”
El Burlador de Sevilla by Tirso de Molina: “What attracts and impresses us in El Burlador de Sevilla is not the immediate urgency of repentance, but the heroism of daring to be the enemy of God.”
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: “When he finds people chattering harmlessly about Anatole France and Nietzsche, he devastates them with Matthew Arnold, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, and even Macaulay”
Books that mention Man and Superman (3)
The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: “from _Wuthering Heights_ to _Man and Superman_, and the plays of Ibsen”
The Library of Babel and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges: “the hell of Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman, pages 86-137), which vainly distracts eternity with the artifices of luxury, art, erotica and fame”
Words of a Pygmy by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: “It is not men who hunt women but women who hunt men. Shaw dramatized this fact in Man and Superman, but he was not the first to do so. [auto-translated]”