The world fame of Samuel Beckett is due to a combination of high academic esteem and immense popularity. An innovator in prose fiction to rival Joyce, his plays have been the most influential in modern theatre history. As an author in both English and French and a writer for the page and the stage, Beckett has been the focus for specialist treatment in each of his many guises, but there have been few attempts to provide a conspectus view. This book, first published in 1994, provides thirteen introductory essays on every aspect of Beckett's work, some paying particular attention to his most famous plays (e.g. Waiting for Godot and Endgame) and his prose fictions (e.g. the 'trilogy' and Murphy). Other essays tackle his radio and television drama, his theatre directing and his poetry, followed by more general issues such as Beckett's bilingualism and his relationship to the philosophers. Reference material is provided at the front and back of the book.

A leading Beckett scholar and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Beckett, offers a coherent critical account of Beckett's earliest years.

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cod and Salt, a delectable look at the cultural, historical, and gastronomical layers of one of the world's most beloved culinary staples-featuring original illustrations and recipes from around the world. As Julia Child once said, “It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions.” Historically, she's been right-and not just in the kitchen. Flourishing in just about every climate and culture around the world, onions have provided the essential basis not only for sautés, stews, and sauces, but for medicines, metaphors, and folklore. Now they're Kurlansky's most flavorful infatuation yet as he sets out to explore how and why the crop reigns from Italy to India and everywhere in between. Featuring historical images and his own pen-and-ink drawings, Kurlansky begins with the science and history of the only sulfuric acid–spewing plant, then digs through its twenty varieties and the cultures built around them. Entering the kitchen, Kurlansky celebrates the raw, roasted, creamed, marinated, and pickled. Including a recipe section featuring more than one hundred dishes from around the world, The Core of an Onion shares the secrets to celebrated Parisian chef Alain Senderens's onion soup eaten to cure late-night drunkenness; Hemingway's raw onion and peanut butter sandwich; and the Gibson, a debonair gin martini garnished with a pickled onion. Just as the scent of sautéed onions will lure anyone to the kitchen, The Core of an Onion is sure to draw readers into their savory stories at first taste.

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.

This book is the first introduction to unite accessible accounts not only of Beckett's life and work, but of the key literary and theoretical concepts used in the study of his writing.

Neil Cornwell's study, while endeavouring to present an historical survey of absurdist literature and its forbears, does not aspire to being an exhaustive history of absurdism. Rather, it pauses on certain historical moments, artistic movements, literary figures and selected works, before moving on to discuss four key writers: Daniil Kharms, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien. The absurd in literature will be of compelling interest to a considerable range of students of comparative, European (including Russian and Central European) and English literatures (British Isles and American) – as well as those more concerned with theatre studies, the avant-garde and the history of ideas (including humour theory). It should also have a wide appeal to the enthusiastic general reader.

The Body and the Arts focuses on the dynamic relation between the body and the arts: the body as inspiration, subject, symbol and medium. Contributors from a variety of disciplines explore this relation across a range of periods and art forms, spanning medicine, literature from the classical period to the present, and visual and performing arts.

Samuel 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.

The 35 new and 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 BeckettOCOs 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 Rabat(r), and Mark Nixon, as well as emerging researchers, present the latest critical thinking in 9 key areas: Art & Aesthetics; Fictions; European Context; Irish Context; Film, Radio & Television; Language/Writing; Philosophies; Theatre & Performance; Global Beckett. 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."e;