This book of collected essays approaches Beckett’s work through the context of modernism, while situating it in the literary tradition at large. It builds on current debates aiming to redefine ‘modernism’ in connection to concepts such as ‘late modernism’ or ‘postmodernism’. Instead of definitively re-categorizing Beckett under any of these labels, the essays use his diverse oeuvre – encompassing poetry, criticism, prose, theatre, radio and film – as a case study to investigate and reassess the concept of ‘modernism after postmodernism’ in all its complexity, covering a broad range of topics spanning Beckett’s entire career. In addition to more thematic essays about art, history, politics, psychology and philosophy, the collection places his work in relation to that of other modernists such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, as well as to the literary canon in general. It represents an important contribution to both Beckett studies and modernism studies.

This is a collection of authoritative essays on Samuel Beckett's writing from a pre-eminent scholar of twentieth-century literature and culture.

The novel is modernism's most vital and experimental genre. With a chronology and guide to further reading, this 2007 Companion is an accessible and informative overview of the genre.

Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath explores Beckett's literary responses to the political maelstroms of his formative and middle years: the Irish civil war and the crisis of commitment in 1930s Europe, the rise of fascism and the atrocities of World War II. Archive yields a Beckett who monitored propaganda in speeches and newspapers, and whose creative work engages with specific political strategies, rhetoric, and events. Finally, Beckett's political aesthetic sharpens into focus. Deep within form, Beckett models ominous historical developments as surely as he satirizes artistic and philosophical interpretations that overlook them. He burdens aesthetic production with guilt: imagination and language, theater and narrative, all parallel political techniques. Beckett comically embodies conservative religious and political doctrines; he plays Irish colonial history against contemporary European horrors; he examines aesthetic complicity in effecting atrocity and covering it up. This book offers insightful, original, and vivid readings of Beckett's work up to Three Novels and Endgame.

Covers English literature, French literature, and theatre in the 20th century.

This book attests to the unique development of modernism in Ireland - driven by political as well as artistic concerns.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernist writers developed new techniques for depicting characters' thoughts, feelings, and desires that revolutionized the novel form—a revolution novelists and critics are still reckoning with today. Troubling Late Modernism tracks how those techniques have been perversely reinvented by some of the most influential and innovative writers of the postwar period. Chapters on Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, John Banville, J. M. Coetzee, and Eimear McBride reveal how these writers at once exploit and extend modernist forms of narration to cultivate disquieting affective attachments to protagonists compelled by violent or exploitative sexual desires. By interrogating the expressive power and ethical liabilities of modes of writing that give us intimate access to characters' inner lives, late modernism poses fundamental philosophical questions about emotion and its inseparability from knowledge and ethical deliberation. Whilst other historians of the novel have characterized late modernism's formal innovations as ethically and politically edifying, Troubling Late Modernism highlights their more disquieting potential for lending sympathy and profundity to sentiments deemed inadmissible in our everyday lives. Charting late modernism's characteristic fusion of aesthetic difficulty with emotional and ethical provocation demands an approach attuned to the experience of reading these disturbingly erotic narratives. In dialogue with recent debates about critical method, Troubling Late Modernism presents a new way of closely reading prose fiction that brings together the lessons of formalism and affect theory.

A volume of essays to provide compelling evidence of the continuing relevance of Ireland to Beckett's writing.

A landmark collection showcasing the diversity of Samuel Beckett's creative output The 35 original chapters in this Companion capture the continued vitality of Beckett studies in drama, music and the visual arts and establish rich and varied cultural contexts for Beckett's work world-wide. As well as considering topics such as Beckett and science, historiography, geocriticism and philosophy, the volume focuses on the post-centenary impetus within Beckett studies, emphasising a return to primary sources amid letters, drafts, and other documents. Major Beckett critics such as Steven Connor, David Lloyd, Andrew Gibson, John Pilling, Jean-Michel Rabate, and Mark Nixon, as well as emerging researchers, present the latest critical thinking in 9 key areas: Art & Aesthetics; The Body; Fiction; Film, Radio & Television; Global Beckett; Language / Writing; Philosophy; Reading; and Theatre & Performance. Edited by eminent Beckett scholar S. E. Gontarski, the Companion draws on the most vital, ground-breaking research to outline the nature of Beckett studies for the next generation.

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Discussion and Essays, grade: 73, University of Strathclyde, course: English Literature, language: English, abstract: At the turn of the 20th century, a crisis in Enlightenment humanism had began to emerge; from the ashes of a dying romantic era, a cultural revolution known as the modernist movement arose as ‘a progressive force promising to liberate humankind from ignorance and irrationality’ (Taket and White, p. 869). Weary from the weak, unchanging patterns of Victorian writing, a collection of writers sought to break away from pre-existing ‘dead-end’ methods of creating literature by exploring new styles which were expressed in their prose and poetic works. Placing a greater emphasis upon experimentation, modernist writers took a great interest in purposely disorientating their readership with fragmentation and elements of the absurd. A conscious experimentation with language to express both its powers and limitations became apparent components in a vast body of modern literature. Whilst the previous era embodied a strong connection to nature in the belief this relationship was crucial for man’s development as an individual, modern writers displayed little interest towards the natural world. Instead, an established vein of modern thought developed that progress as an individual was dependent upon directing the eye inward.