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Samuel Beckett
by L. Graver R. FedermanThis set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.
Samuel Beckett: Intersections With Popular Culture (Routledge Guides to Literature #6)
by David PattieSamuel Beckett's work forever changed the concepts of literature and theatre. His work remains a core part of introductory courses on literary history, drama, theatre or performance and also features in more specialist modules such as Modernism or The Absurd. Samuel Beckett is a comprehensive introduction to his life and work as well as an outline of the critical issues surrounding his work. This guidebook leaves judgements up to the student by explaining the full range of often very different critical views and interpretations and offers guides to further reading in each area discussed.
Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe
by Mariko Hori Tanaka Yoshiki Tajiri Michiko TsushimaSamuel Beckett and Catastrophe is a groundbreaking collection of original essays that explore the relation between Samuel Beckett and catastrophe in terms of war, the Holocaust, nuclear disasters and ecological crisis. Responding to the post-catastrophic situations in the twentieth century, Beckett created characters who often seem to have been through an unknown catastrophe. Although the importance of catastrophe in Beckett has been noted sporadically, there has been no substantial attempt to discuss his aesthetics and work in relation to it. This collection will therefore serve as the first sustained study to explore the theme of catastrophe in Beckett and will be a highly significant contribution to Beckett studies.
Samuel Beckett and Cultural Nationalism (Elements in Beckett Studies)
by Shane WellerDrawing on evidence from his published works, manuscripts, and correspondence, Samuel Beckett and Cultural Nationalism explores Beckett's engagement with the theme of cultural nationalism throughout his writing life, revealing the various ways in which he sought to challenge culturally nationalist conceptions of art and literature, while never embracing a cosmopolitan approach. The Element shows how, in his pre-Second World War writings, Beckett sought openly to mock Irish nationalist ideas of culture and language, but that, in so doing, he failed to avoid what he himself described as a 'clot of prejudices'. In his post-war works in French and English, however, following time spent in Nazi Germany in 1936-7 as well as in the French Resistance during the Second World War, Beckett began to take a new approach to ideas of national-cultural affiliation, at the heart of which was a conception of the human as a citizen of nowhere.
Samuel Beckett and Recent Irish Fiction: A Comparative Study (Routledge Studies in Irish Literature)
by David McKinneyThis volume considers Samuel Beckett’s fiction and drama as major aesthetic and thematic influences on the work of Irish authors Eimear McBride, Keith Ridgway, Emma Donoghue, and Kevin Barry in the post-crash period of 2009–2015. Through cross-comparisons between the aesthetics and form of Beckett’s Trilogy, Mercier and Camier, Footfalls and Not I, and those of a range of post-crash Irish novels including Beatlebone, Hawthorn and Child, Room, and A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, this book establishes Beckett’s continuing influence on Irish fiction. With particular reference to these newer authors’ treatment of scarcity, trauma, indeterminism, gender and sexuality, and confinement in the context of major societal changes and traumas in Irish society since 2009, topics include the imposition of austerity, collapse of faith in institutions, and the increasing recognition of LGBTQIA+ and reproductive rights.
Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts and Non-Print Media (Routledge Library Editions: Beckett #4)
by Lois OppenheimThis book, first published in 1999, addresses Beckett’s visual and musical sensibilities, and examines his visionary use of such diverse modes of creative expression as stage, radio, television and film, when his medium was the written word. The first section of the book focuses on music; the second part analyses the visual arts; and the third part examines film, radio and television. This book uncovers aspects of his thinking on, and use of the arts that have been little studied, including the nonfigurative function of music and art in Beckett’s work; the ‘collaborations’ undertaken by composers, painters and choreographers with his texts; the relation of his literary to his visual and musical artistry; and his use of film, radio and television as innovative means and celebration of artistic process.
Samuel Beckett and the Language of Subjectivity
by Derval TubridySamuel Beckett and the Language of Subjectivity is the first sustained exploration of aporia as a vital, subversive, and productive figure within Beckett's writing as it moves between prose and theatre. Informed by key developments in analytic and continental philosophies of language, Tubridy's fluent analysis demonstrates how Beckett's translations - between languages, genres, bodies, and genders - offer a way out of the impasse outlined in his early aesthetics. The primary modes of the self's extension into the world are linguistic (speaking, listening) and material (engaging with bodies, spaces and objects). Yet what we mean by language has changed in the twenty-first century. Beckett's concern with words must be read through the information economy in which contemporary identities are forged. Derval Tubridy provides the groundwork for new insights on Beckett in terms of the posthuman: the materialist, vitalist and relational subject cathected within differential mechanisms of power.
Samuel Beckett Comment C'est How It Is And / et L'image: A Critical-Genetic Edition Une Edition Critic-Genetique
by Samuel BeckettThis book contains the English and French texts and a complete record of the genesis of each. Besides Comment C'est How It Is, O'Reilly has included L'Image and an excerpt from Comment C'est that was published later in another volume.
Samuel Beckett's Critical Aesthetics
by Tim LawrenceThis book considers how Samuel Beckett’s critical essays, dialogues and reflections drew together longstanding philosophical discourses about the nature of representation, and fostered crucial, yet overlooked, connections between these discourses and his fiction and poetry. It also pays attention to Beckett’s writing for little-magazines in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, before going on to consider how the style of Beckett’s late prose recalls and develops figures and themes in his critical writing. By providing a long-overdue assessment of Beckett’s work as a critic, this study shows how Beckett developed a new aesthetic in knowing dialogue with ideas including phenomenology, Kandinsky’s theories of abstraction, and avant-garde movements such as Surrealism. This book will be illuminating for students and researchers interested not just in Beckett, but in literary modernism, the avant-garde, European visual culture and philosophy.
Samuel Beckett's Geological Imagination (Elements in Beckett Studies)
by Mark ByronSamuel Beckett's Geological Imagination addresses the ubiquity of earthy objects in Beckett's prose, drama and poetry, exploring how mineral and archaeological objects bear upon the themes, narrative locus, and sensibilities of Beckett's texts in surprisingly varied ways. By deploying figures of ruination and excavation with etymological self-awareness, Beckett's late prose narratives – Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho – comprise a late-career meditation on the stratigraphic layerings of language and memory over an extended writing career. These layers comprise an embodied record of writing in their allusions to literary history and to Beckett's own oeuvre.
Samuel Beckett’s Italian Modernisms: Tradition, Texts, Performance (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Michela Bariselli Davide Crosara Antonio Gambacorta Mario MartinoIn the wake of both Joycean and Dantean celebrations, this volume aims to investigate the fecund influence of Italian culture on Samuel Beckett’s work, with a specific focus on the twentieth century.Located at the intersection of historical avant-garde movements and a renewed interest in tradition, Italian modernism reimagined Italy and its culture, projecting it beyond the shadow of fascism. Following in Joyce’s footsteps, Samuel Beckett soon became an attentive reader of Italian modernist authors. These had a profound effect on his early work, shaping his artistic identity. The influence of his early readings found its way also into Beckett’s postwar writing and, most poignantly, in his theatre. The contributions in this collection rekindle the debate around Beckett as modernist author through the lenses of Italian culture.This study will be of particular interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies, Italian studies, English studies, and comparative literature.
Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape (The Fourth Wall)
by Daniel Sack"We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us." - Krapp Samuel Beckett’s most accessible play is also one of the twentieth century’s most moving dramas about aging, memory, and disappointment. Daniel Sack offers the first comprehensive survey of Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) with a general reader in mind. Structured around a series of questions, five approachable sections contextualize the play in the larger career of its Nobel-Prize-winning writer, explore its major thematic concerns, and offer comparative analyses with Beckett’s other signal works. Sack also uses discussions of significant productions, including those directed by the playwright himself, to ground interpretation of the play in terms of its performance and provide a useful resource to directors and actors. Both a critical and personal exploration of this haunting play, this volume is a must-read for anyone with an interest in Beckett’s work.
Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction: Problems in Postmodernism (New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century)
by James BaxterSamuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction provides an overdue investigation into Beckett’s rich influences over American writing. Through in-depth readings of postmodern authors such as Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and Lydia Davis, this book situates Beckett’s post-war writing of exhaustion and generation in relation to the emergence of an explosive American avant-garde. In turn, this study provides a valuable insight into the practical realities of Beckett’s dissemination in America, following the author’s long-standing relationship with the countercultural magazine Evergreen Review and its dramatic role in redrawing the possibilities of American culture in the 1960s. While Beckett would be largely removed from his American context, this book follows his vigorous, albeit sometimes awkward, reception alongside the authors and institutions central to shaping his legacies in 20th and 21st century America.
Samuel Beckett's Poetry
by James Brophy William DaviesSamuel Beckett's Poetry is the first book-length study of Beckett's complete poetry, designed for students and scholars of twentieth century poetry and literature, as well as for specialists of Beckett's work. This volume explores how poetry provided Beckett a medium of expression during key moments in his life, from his earliest attempts at securing a reputation as a published writer, to the work of restoring his own speech while suffering aphasia shortly before his death. Often these were moments of desperation and discouragement, when more substantial works were not possible: moments of illness, of personal loss or of public disaster. This volume includes an introduction that contextualizes Beckett as a poet and a chronology of the composition and publication of all his known poems. Essays offer a range of critical perspectives, from translation theory, war poetics and Irish Studies to Beckett's debts to Modernism, Romanticism and the Jazz Age.
Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America
by Natka BianchiniA study of the 30-year collaboration between playwright Samuel Beckett and director Alan Schneider, Bianchini reconstructs their shared American productions between 1956 and 1984. By examining how Beckett was introduced to American audiences, this book leads into a wider historical discussion of American theatre in the mid-to-late 20th century.
Samuel Butler against the Professionals: Rethinking Lamarckism 1860-1900
by David GillottIn the wake of the 2009 Darwin bicentenary, Samuel Butler (1835-1902) is becoming as well known for his public attack on Darwin's character and the basis of his scientific authority as for his novels Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh. In the first monograph devoted to Butler's ideas for over twenty years, David Gillott offers a much-needed reappraisal of Butler's work and shows how Lamarckian ideas pervaded the whole of Butler's wide-ranging ouevre, and not merely his evolutionary theory. In particular, he argues that Lamarckism was the foundation on which Butler's attempt to undermine professional authority in a variety of disciplines was based. Samuel Butler against the Professionals provides new insight into a fascinating but often misunderstood writer, and on the surprisingly broad application of Lamarckian ideas in the decades following publication of the Origin of Species.
Samuel Butler, Victorian Against the Grain
by James G. ParadisSamuel Butler (1835-1902), Victorian satirist, critic, and visual artist, possessed one of the most original and inquiring imaginations of his age. The author of two satires, Erewhon (1872) and The Way of All Flesh (1903), Butler's intellectually adventurous explorations along the cultural frontiers of his time appeared in volume after eccentric volume. Author of four works on evolution, he was one of the most prolific evolutionary speculators of his time. He was an innovative travel writer and art historian who used the creative insights of his own painting, photography, and local knowledge to invent, in works like Alps and Sanctuaries (1881), a vibrant Italian culture that contrasted with the spiritually frigid experience of his High Church upbringing.Despite his range and achievement, there remains surprisingly little contemporary analytical commentary on Butler's work. Samuel Butler, Victorian against the Grain is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that provides a critical overview of Butler's career, one which places his multifaceted body of work within the cultural framework of the Victorian age. The essays, taken together, discuss the formation of Victorian England's ultimate polymath, an artistic and intellectual ventriloquist who assumed an extraordinary range of roles - as satirist, novelist, evolutionist, natural theologian, travel writer, art historian, biographer, classicist, painter, and photographer.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Musical Life
by Jeffrey GreenGreen’s study is more than a biography of an Anglo-African composer.The first comprehensive study of Coleridge-Taylor’s life for almost a century, it reveals how class-ridden Britain could embrace even the most unlikely of cultural icons.
Samuel Johnson
by Walter Jackson BateW. Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson has been hailed as a supreme example of the biographer's art and the first great modern life of Johnson. Bate's work is literary biography at its finest, delving into the character that formed Johnson's awesome intellect and fueled his prodigious output.<P><P> Winner of the Pulitzer Prize<P> Winner of the National Book Award
Samuel Johnson: The Critical Heritage
by James T. BoultonFirst published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Samuel Johnson: Selected Works
by Samuel JohnsonA one‑volume collection of the prose and poetry of eighteenth‑century Britain's pre‑eminent lexicographer, critic, biographer, and poet Samuel Johnson Samuel Johnson was eighteenth‑century Britain&’s preeminent man of letters, and his influence endures to this day. He excelled as a moral and literary critic, biographer, lexicographer, and poet. This anthology, designed to make Johnson&’s essential works accessible to students and general readers, draws its texts from the definitive Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. In most cases, texts are included in full rather than excerpted. The anthology includes many essays from The Rambler and other periodicals; Rasselas; the prefaces to Johnson&’s Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare; the complete Lives of Cowley, Milton, Pope, Savage, and Gray, as well as generous selections from A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Some parts are arranged thematically, allowing readers to focus on such topics as religion, marriage, war, and literature. The anthology includes a biographical introduction, and its ample annotation updates and enlarges the commentary in the YaleEdition.
Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings: A Tercentenary Celebration
by Samuel JohnsonThanks to Boswell’s monumental biography of Samuel Johnson, we remember Dr. Johnson today as a great wit and conversationalist, the rationalist epitome and the sage of the Enlightenment. He is more often quoted than read, his name invoked in party conversation on such diverse topics as marriage, sleep, deceit, mental concentration, and patriotism, to generally humorous effect. But in Johnson’s own day, he was best known as an essayist, critic, and lexicographer: a gifted writer possessed of great force of mind and wisdom. Writing a century after Johnson, Ruskin wrote of Johnson’s essays: He “taught me to measure life, and distrust fortune…he saved me forever from false thoughts and futile speculations.” Peter Martin here presents “the heart of Johnson,” a selection of some of Johnson’s best moral and critical essays. At the center of this collection are the periodical essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler. Also included are Johnson’s great moral fable, Rasselas; the Prefaces to the Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare; and selections from Lives of the Poets. Together, these works—allied in their literary, social, and moral concerns—are the ones that continue to speak urgently to readers today.
Samuel Johnson
by MeyersFord Madox Ford declared Samuel Johnson "the most tragic of all our major literary figures. ” Blessed with a formidable intellect and a burning passion for ideas, Johnson also struggled throughout his life with mental instability and numerous physical defects. One of the most illustrious figures of the English literary tradition, Johnson made his fame as poet, essayist, critic, dictionary-maker, conversationalist, and all-around larger-than-life personality. His success was all the greater for the adversity he had to overcome in achieving it. Drawing on a lifetime of study of Johnson and his era, as well as a wide array of new archival materials, noted biographer Jeffrey Meyers tells the extraordinary story of one of the great geniuses of English letters. Johnson emerges in his portrait as a mass of contradictions: lazy and energetic, aggressive and tender, melancholy and witty, comforted yet tormented by religion. He was physically repulsive and slovenly in dress and habits, but his social ideas were progressive and humane--he strongly opposed slavery and the imperial exploitation of indigenous peoples. He gave generously to the poor and homeless, rescued prostitutes, and defended criminals who’d been condemned to hang. But these charitable acts could not dispel the darkness that clouded his world: overwhelming guilt and fear of eternal damnation. A masterful portrait of a brilliant and tormented figure, this book reintroduces a new generation of readers to the heroic Dr. Johnson.
Samuel Johnson After 300 Years
by Greg ClinghamTo mark the tercentenary of Samuel Johnson's birth in 2009, the specially-commissioned essays contained here review his scholarly reputation. An international team of experts reflects authoritatively on the various dimensions of literary, historical, critical and ethical life touched by Johnson's extraordinary achievement. The volume distinctively casts its net widely and combines consistently innovative thinking on Johnson's historical role with a fresh sense of present criticism. Chapters cover subjects as diverse as Johnson's moral philosophy, his legal thought, his influence on Jane Austen, and the question of the Johnson canon. The contributors examine the larger theoretical and scholarly contexts in which it is now possible to situate his work, and from which it may often be necessary to differentiate it. All the contributors have a distinguished record of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies, Johnson scholarship, and cultural history and theory.