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

"A fascination with childhood unites the artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) and the writers Samuel Beckett (1906-89) and Marcel Proust (1871-1922). But while many commentators have traced their childhood images back to memories of lived experiences, there is more to their mythologies of childhood that waits to be explored. They invite us to move away from familiar ideas - whether psychological or biographical - about what a child can represent, and even what a child is. The haunting child figures of Bourgeois, Beckett and Proust echo each other as they show how imagining origins- for a life, for a work of art - involves paradoxes that test the limits of our forms of expression. Art meets literature, profusion meets concision, French meets English, and images of childhood reveal new insights in this encounter between three great figures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Catherine Crimp holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and is currently Lectrice d'anglais at theEcole Normale Superieure de Lyon."

Table of Contents/Table des matières Early Modern Beckett/Beckett et le début de l¿ère moderne Introduction/Avant-propos I. In Dialogue with Dramatists and Writers/En dialogue avec des auteurs dramatiques et des écrivains Carla Taban: Le Molière de Beckett Angela Moorjani: Beckett¿s Racinian Fictions: ¿Racine and the Modern Novel¿ Revisited Danièle de Ruyter: Fascination de la tragédie Racinienne: résonances dans Oh les beaux jours Arka Chattopadhyay: ¿Worst In Need Of Worse¿: King Lear, Worstward Ho and the Trajectory of Worsening Julie Campbell: Allegories of Clarity and Obscurity: Bunyan¿s The Pilgrim¿s Progress and Beckett¿s Molloy Seán Kennedy: Edmund Spenser, Famine Memory and the Discontents of Humanism in Endgame Melanie Foehn: A Rhetoric of Discontinuity: On Stylistic Parallels between Pascal¿s Pensées and Samuel Beckett¿s L¿Innommable II. In Dialogue with Philosophers and Artists/En dialogue avec des philosophes et des artistes Yoshiyuki Inoue: Cartesian Mechanics in Beckett¿s Fin de Partie Layla M. Roesler: En compagnie d¿une métaphysique parodique: Beckett lecteur de Descartes redux Everett C. Frost: Beckett and Geulincx¿s Ethics: ¿¿my Geulincx could only be a literary fantasia¿ Naoya Mori: Beckett¿s Faint Cries: Leibniz¿s petites perceptions in First Love and Malone Dies Claire Lozier: Présence de la sculpture funéraire des débuts de l¿époque moderne dans l¿¿uvre narrative de Samuel Beckett: du motif artistique religieux à sa laïcisation scripturale Joanne Shaw: Light and Darkness in Elsheimer, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Beckett Beckett Between/Beckett entre deux Introduction Dúnlaith Bird: Light, Landscape and Beckett James Williams: Beckett between the Words: Punctuation and the Body in the English Prose Alys Moody: The Non-Lieu of Hunger: Post-war Beckett and the Genealogies of Starvation Dirk Van Hulle: The Extended Mind and Multiple Drafts: Beckett¿s Models of the Mind and the Postcognitivist Paradigm Everett C. Frost: Beckett and Geulincx¿s Metaphysics: ¿Without knowing why exactly¿ John Wall: ¿L¿au-delà du dehors-dedans¿: Paradox, Space and Movement in Beckett Lea Sinoimeri: ¿Ill-Told Ill-Heard¿: Aurality and Reading in Comment c¿est/How It Is Karine Germoni and Pascale Sardin: Tensions of the In-Between: Rhythm, Tonelessness and Lyricism in Fin de partie/Endgame Iain Baily: Beckett, Bilingualism and the Bible Garin Dowd: The Proxemics of ¿Neither¿ Contributors/Auteurs

In life, Beckett was notoriously reticent, preferring to let his work speak for itself. In the first half of this collection, he reveals many of his inner thoughts and honest opinions about his life, writing, friends, and colleagues in candid interviews published for the first time in this book. He discusses his friendship with James Joyce and his role in the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France. Also included are newly discovered photographs of Beckett—as a young boy, as a teacher, as best man at a friend’s wedding, and with painter Henri Hayden. In the second half, friends and colleagues share their memories of Beckett as a schoolboy, a teacher, a struggling young writer, and a sudden success in 1953 with the appearance of Waiting for Godot. Readers will be enchanted by the poignant remembrances by those who knew him best, worked with him most closely, or admired him for his enduring influence: including actors Hume Cronyn, Jean Martin, Jessica Tandy, and Billie Whitelaw and fellow playwrights and authors Edward Albee, Paul Auster, E. M. Cioran, J. M. Coetzee, Eugène Ionesco, Edna O’Brien, and Tom Stoppard.

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

The present volume gathers all of Beckett's texts for theatre, from 1955 to 1984. It includes both the major dramatic works and the short and more compressed texts for the stage and for radio. 'He believes in the cadence, the comma, the bite of word on reality, whatever else he believes; and his devotion to them, he makes clear, is a sufficient focus for the reader's attention. In the modern history of literature he is a unique moral figure, not a dreamer of rose-gardens but a cultivator of what will grow in the waste land, who can make us see the exhilarating design that thorns and yucca share with whatever will grow anywhere.' - Hugh Kenner Contents: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, All That Fall, Acts Without Words, Krapp's Last Tape, Roughs for the Theatre, Embers, Roughs for the Radio, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio,... but the clouds..., A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht und Traume, What Where.