Samuel Beckett: Undoing Time

Since his death in 1989, it has become difficult to imagine that Samuel Beckett was once a virtually unknown writer. Born in 1906 into a respectable middle-class family in a Dublin suburb, he came late to fame in the early 1950s with the ground-breaking play, Waiting for Godot. Since Godot, Beckett’s writings have been translated, published, and staged throughout the world. This highly accessible and original account offers a new opportunity to engage with a towering figure of Irish and world literature. The book offers a systematic overview of Samuel Beckett’s best-known and most popular work - in poetry, drama, prose, radio, and television - along with his more difficult pieces. Original close readings explore his transformative work on language and form. For Beckett, life was a matter of doing time, while writing was a way of undoing it. In the process, writers, audiences, and readers enter into a different understanding of how it is to be human. *** Librarians: ebook available on ProQuest and EBSCO *** Providing historical context and relevant details about Beckett’s life, in both Ireland and France, Birkett offers fresh insight into his work, bringing much clarity to his aesthetic vision and purpose and revealing his continuing relevance. Highly recommended. – Choice, Vol. 53, No. 5, January 2016 *** …an impressively written work of seminal scholarship and a critically important addition to academic library Literary Studies reference collections in general, and Samuel Beckett supplemental studies reading lists in particular. – Midwest Book Review, Reviewer’s Bookwatch: October 2015, Julie’s Bookshelf [Subject: Literary Criticism, Irish Studies]