This is an eloquent and accessible introduction to one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. This book provides biographical and contextual information, but more fundamentally, it also considers how we might think about an enduringly difficult and experimental novelist and playwright who often challenges the very concepts of meaning and interpretation. It deals with his life, intellectual and cultural background, plays, prose, and critical response and relates Beckett's work and vision to the culture and context from which he wrote. McDonald provides a sustained analysis of the major plays, including Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days and his major prose works including Murphy, Watt and his famous 'trilogy' of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable). This introduction concludes by mapping the huge terrain of criticism Beckett's work has prompted, and it explains the turn in recent years to understanding Beckett within his historical context.

The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett

The present annual bibliography follows the basic principles and limitations described in the first installment of March '974. The main objective is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of modem dramatic literature. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modem world drama, including playwrights who lived past 1900 (plus Biichner and Becque) and influential men and women of the theatre other than performers. The checklist is divided as follows:

Modern Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography

Steven Connor, one of the most influential critics of twentieth-century literature and culture, has spent much of his career writing and thinking about Samuel Beckett. This book presents Connor's finest published work on Beckett alongside fresh essays that explore how Beckett has shaped major themes in modernism and twentieth-century literature. Through discussions of sport, nausea, slowness, flies, the radio switch, religion and academic life, Connor shows how Beckett's writing is characteristic of a distinctively mundane or worldly modernism, arguing that it is well-attuned to our current concern with the stressed relations between the human and natural worlds. Through Connor's analysis, Beckett's prose, poetry and dramatic works animate a modernism profoundly concerned with life, worldly existence and the idea of the world as such. Lucid, provocative, wide-ranging, and richly informed by critical and cultural theory, this book is required reading for anyone teaching or studying Beckett, modernism and twentieth-century literary studies.

Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination

The main objective of the current thesis is to provide thorough research on the workings of memory, especially traumatic memory in Samuel Beckett?s theatre. In the universe of Beckett?s theatre memory and trauma are fully interwoven. To demonstrate this, psychological and psychoanalytical theories are applied. The objects of the current research include the physical stage language, disembodied voices and fragmented bodies on stage, as well as the language of trauma itself. Different types of trauma are analyzed, such as trauma of loss and mourning, failure, etc., but the most prominent trauma in Beckett?s theatre is Otto Rank?s trauma of birth. The plays that are focused upon in this thesis are Endgame, Krapp?s Last Tape, Embers, Footfalls, Eh Joe, That Time, Happy Days, Play, Not I and A Piece of Monologue.

Staging memory and trauma: past voices and bodies haunting the present in the theatre of Samuel Beckett

Modernism and the Machinery of Madness demonstrates the emergence of a technological form of paranoia within modernist culture which transformed much of the period's experimental fiction. Gaedtke argues that the works of writers such as Samuel Beckett, Anna Kavan, Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and others respond to the collapse of categorical distinctions between human and machine. Modern British and Irish novels represent a convergence between technological models of the mind and new media that were often regarded as 'thought-influencing machines'. Gaedtke shows that this literary paranoia comes into new focus when read in light of twentieth-century memoirs of mental illness. By thinking across the discourses of experimental fiction, mental illness, psychiatry, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind, this book shows the historical and conceptual sources of this confusion as well as the narrative responses. This book contributes to the fields of modernist studies, disability studies, and medical humanities.

Peter Davison

Papers

Beckett and broadcasting: A study of the works of Samuel Beckett for and in radio and television