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.

A selectively comprehensive bibliography of the vast literature about Samuel Beckett's dramatic works, arranged for the efficient and convenient use of scholars on all levels.

No modern play in the western dramatic tradition has provoked as much controversy or generated as much diversity of opinion as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Since its initial production in 1953, it has revolutionized the stage through its existentialism and apparent rejection of plot. This book is a valuable introduction to the play. It begins with a summary of the play and its origins and editions. It then explores the play's meaning and the historical and intellectual contexts informing Beckett's work. The book then examines Beckett's dramatic art and gives full coverage of the play's performance history. A bibliographical essay surveys the most important critical studies.

Samuel 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.

The Reader makes readily available for the first time 17 major, previously uncollected significant essays from the Journal of Beckett Studies from 1992 to the present.

Reflecting the rich critical debate at the ‘Beckett and the State of Ireland’ conferences held in Dublin between 2011 and 2013, this volume brings together a selection of essays which explore and respond to the Irish concerns which echo in the fiction, drama, and poetry of Samuel Beckett. From the portrayals of the haunting landscape of South County Dublin in Beckett’s work to its interrogation of the political and social pieties of the infant nation state in which the author came to maturity, Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland uncovers the enduring presence of Ireland in one of the most influential bodies of writing in modern literature. Examining the politics of cultural identity, sexuality in the post-independence era, representations of disability in Beckett’s fiction and drama, Ireland’s culture of incarceration, the role of eugenics in the Irish cultural imagination, and the themes of exile and displacement in Beckett’s writing, amongst other concerns, Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland enriches understandings of the social, cultural, and political dimensions of Beckett’s work and introduces new and challenging perspectives to the study of Irish literature and culture.

An expressive dialogue between Deleuze's philosophical writings on cinema and Beckett's innovative film and television work, the book explores the relationship between the birth of the event – itself a simultaneous invention and erasure - and Beckett's attempts to create an incommensurable space within the interstices of language as a (W)hole.

It was as a poet that Samuel Beckett launched himself in the little reviews of 1930s Paris, and as a poet that he ended his career. This new selection, from Whoroscope (1930) to ‘what is the word’ (1988), describes a lifetime’s arc of writing. It was as a poet moreover that Beckett made his first breakthrough into writing in French, and the Selected Poems represents work in both languages, including the sequence of brief but highly crafted mirlitonnades, which did so much to usher in the style of his late prose, and come as close as anything he wrote to honouring the ambition to ‘bore one hole after another in language, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through.’ Also included are several of Beckett’s translations from contemporaries – Apollinaire, Eluard, Michaux, Montale – in versions which count among his own poetic achievements. my way is in the sand flowingbetween the shingle and the dunethe summer rain rains on my lifeon me my life harrying fleeingto its beginning to its end‘The best of it speaks, or rather whispers, to the inner ear . . . Like the prose, with which they have so much else in common, the poems are instantly striking and mysteriously persistent in the mind and even the nerves. Graphic and vivid, they are also intensely musical: theatrical, too, and continuous with the work for stage, radio and other media . . . Not inexpressive, as their author might have wished, but expressive of a rare vision.’ – Derek Mahon

Volume one of a four volume collection of the works of Samuel Beckett.