This book is a study of the evolving role of women throughout Beckett's work. Beckett's early writing is structured upon very sharply defined gender polaritiesóobjects of alarm, lust, derision, or indifference. Beckett's shift from fiction to stage and media dramaógiving a voice to womenóunsettles this adversarial structure. In later prose and drama, gender qualifies Beckett's people for neither fear nor favor. Mary Bryden's analysis drawing on the insights of such French writers as Deleuze and Guattari, and Helene Cixous, traces how gender dualisms are undermined over the course of Beckett's writing career. She examines the status of sexual indeterminacy in Beckett's work, and concludes with a remarkable case study: that of the mother figure, whose profile alters from dread to tenderness. The book embraces not only Beckett's published prose and drama, but also a number of unpublished and draft manuscripts from Reading University's Beckett Archive. Women in Samuel Beckett's Prose and Drama, will be of great interest to Literary Studies courses in both French and English departments, and Women's Studies courses. Contents: Introduction; Space Invaders: Women of the Early Fiction; Beckett and Deleuze: Gender in Process; Undoing the "Not": Women of the Early Drama; "No Better than Shades No Worse": Women of the Later Drama; Nomad Selves: Women of the Later Prose; Otherhood/Motherhood/Smotherhood: The Mother in Beckett's Writing; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Twelve actresses from seven countries are interviewed about their experience of performing in plays by Samuel Beckett, including their physical and psychological preparation. An additional 19 essays explore critical themes relating to the plays as fiction, as fiction becoming drama, and as drama on stage, radio, and television. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This is Samuel Beckett’s first novel and “literary landmark” (St. Petersburg Times)—a savory introduction to the Nobel Prize–winning author. Written in the summer of 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was poor and struggling to make ends meet, Dream of Fair to Middling Women offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. Later on, Beckett would call the novel “the chest into which I threw all my wild thoughts.” When he submitted it to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous, or too risky, and it was sadly never published during his lifetime. In this stunning first novel, Belacqua—a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and Alba—“wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final ‘relapse into Dublin’,” says the New Yorker. Youthfully exuberant and visibly influenced by Joyce, Dream of Fair to Middling Women is a work of extraordinary virtuosity. Beckett delights in the wordplay and sheer joy of language that mark his later work. Above all in this handsomely bound hardcover edition, the story brims with the black humor that, like brief stabs of sunlight, pierces the darkness of his vision.

This innovative exploration of the recurring use of particular objects in Samuel Beckett's work is the first study of the material imagination of any single modern author. Across five decades of aesthetic and formal experimentation in fiction, drama, poetry and film, Beckett made substantial use of only fourteen objects - well-worn not only where they appear within his works but also in terms of their recurrence throughout his creative corpus. In this volume, Bates offers a striking reappraisal of Beckett's writing, with a focus on the changing functions and impact of this set of objects, and charts, chronologically and across media, the pattern of Beckett's distinctive authorial procedure. The volume's identification of the creative praxis that emerges as an 'art of salvage' offers an integrated way of understanding Beckett's writing, opens up new approaches to his work, and offers a fresh assessment of his importance and relevance today.

The Drama in the Text argues that Beckett's late fiction, like his radio plays, demands to be read aloud, since much of the emotional meaning lodges in its tonality. In Beckett's haunting prose work the reader turns listener, collaborating with the sound of words to elucidate meaning from the silence of the universe. Enoch Brater ranges across all of Beckett's work, quoting from it liberally, and makes connections mainly with other writers, but also with details drawn from the entire Western cultural heritage. Brater serves as an authoritative and persuasive guide to the rich texture of such a difficult but compelling vocabulary, providing recognition, insight, and accessibility.

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.

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.