Dec 20, 2009

Galatea 2.2 | Literary Precedents

Powers' simmediate and most obvious literary debt in Galatea 2.2 is to Roman mythology, notably to Ovid's Metamorphoses, completed probably in the first decade of the common era, which recounts the Pygmalion-Galatea story in some detail. Although the mythological story of Pygmalion's Galatea is an underlying current in Powers's novel, the book is connected less directly with this myth than were Jacinto Grau's Pygmalion (1930), George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1913), or Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's adaptation of the Shaw play, My Fair Lady...