This is an affectionate yet clear-eyed biography of Beckett, written by poet, broadcaster and comic novelist Anthony Cronin. Whilst recognising Beckett's achievements, Cronin attempts to look beyond the myths and stereotypes.

Stjepan Mestrovic takes up and criticizes the major themes of Giddens' work - the concept of 'high modernity' as opposed to 'postmodernity' and his attempted construction of a 'synthetic' tradition based on human agency and structure.

Cronin profiles the life and literary career of the Irish writer.

Beckett criticism is well known for its use of impenetrable jargon in describing the themes in his famous novels, poems and especially his seminal plays Waiting for Godot and Endgame. This book is a decided contrast. Written by one of Beckett's contemporaries, it provides a humanizing portrait of Beckett that has been conspicuously missing from previous biographies. Spanning nearly the whole of the twentieth century, Beckett's life was full of romantic, exciting incidents and fascinating characters such as James Joyce and Peggy Guggenheim. He met his wife as a result of being stabbed by a pimp on the street, was a member of the French Resistance, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 and in later years became a famous figure on the Left Bank. He died on December 22, 1989. Cronin regards Beckett as the last of the great modernists and discusses his life and work in this context. The result is a thoroughly engaging addition to the criticism on one of the century's greatest literary figures, one that belongs on the shelves of all lovers of Beckett.

"In July 1905, in Paris, a young woman, a bride, becomes Marie Schad. In April 1984, in London, Marie Schad is declared to be no more--indeed, to never have been, and returns to France. Paris Bride pursues this no-woman in a wild attempt to glimpse her face in the modernist crowd. With increasing desperation the pages of Stephane Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Louis Aragon, André and Walter Benjamin are all ransacked for traces of Marie. What is pieced precariously together is an experimental life--a properly modernist life, a life that, by its very obscurity, lives the obscure life of modernism itself.

This new collection of essays, including contributions from David Bordwell and Fredric Jameson, surveys Angelopoulos' entire cinematic output, and presents an intelligent and articulate discussion of his major films, themes and concerns. The authors argue that Angelopoulos' sustained oeuvre has kept alive the tradition of postwar modernism - the cinema of Antonioni, Jancso and Ozu - in the largely hostile climate of the 1980s and 1990s.

This volume combines a clear overview for those with no prior knowledge or experience of modernism with a subtle argument that will appeal to higher level undergraduates and scholars.