Samuel Beckett’s Italian Modernisms

Samuel Beckett’s Italian Modernisms
Author: Michela Bariselli
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2024-12-03
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1040260098

In the wake of both Joycean and Dantean celebrations, this volume aims to investigate the fecund influence of Italian culture on Samuel Beckett’s work, with a specific focus on the twentieth century. Located at the intersection of historical avant-garde movements and a renewed interest in tradition, Italian modernism reimagined Italy and its culture, projecting it beyond the shadow of fascism. Following in Joyce’s footsteps, Samuel Beckett soon became an attentive reader of Italian modernist authors. These had a profound effect on his early work, shaping his artistic identity. The influence of his early readings found its way also into Beckett’s postwar writing and, most poignantly, in his theatre. The contributions in this collection rekindle the debate around Beckett as modernist author through the lenses of Italian culture. This study will be of particular interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies, Italian studies, English studies, and comparative literature.

Samuel Beckett's Italian Modernisms

Samuel Beckett's Italian Modernisms
Author: Antonio Gambacorta
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-12-03
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781032363899

In the wake of both Joycean and Dantean celebrations, this volume aims to investigate the fecund influence of Italian culture on Samuel Beckett's work, with a specific focus on the Twentieth Century. Located at the intersection of historical avant-garde movements and a renewed interest in tradition, Italian modernism reimagined Italy and its culture, projecting it beyond the shadow of fascism. Following in Joyce's footsteps, Samuel Beckett soon became an attentive reader of Italian modernist authors. These had a profound effect on his early work, shaping his artistic identity. The influence of his early readings found its way also into Beckett's postwar writing and, most poignantly, in his theatre. The contributions in this collection rekindle the debate around Beckett as modernist author through the lenses of Italian culture. This study will be of particular interest to students and scholars in Theatre and Performance Studies, Italian Studies, English Studies, Comparative Literature.

The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett

The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett
Author: Dirk Van Hulle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2015-01-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 110707519X

The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett offers an accessible introduction to issues animating the field of Beckett studies today.

Samuel Beckett in Context

Samuel Beckett in Context
Author: Anthony Uhlmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2013-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107017033

Provides a comprehensive exploration of Beckett's historical, cultural and philosophical contexts, offering new critical insights for scholars and general readers.

Beckett’s Art of Mismaking

Beckett’s Art of Mismaking
Author: Leland de la Durantaye
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2016-01-04
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0674504852

Leland de la Durantaye helps us understand Beckett’s strangeness and notorious difficulty by arguing that Beckett’s lifelong campaign was to mismake on purpose—not to denigrate himself, or his audience, or reconnect with the child or savage within, but because he believed that such mismaking is in the interest of art and will shape its future.

Beckett and Modernism

Beckett and Modernism
Author: Olga Beloborodova
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2018-04-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319703749

This book of collected essays approaches Beckett’s work through the context of modernism, while situating it in the literary tradition at large. It builds on current debates aiming to redefine ‘modernism’ in connection to concepts such as ‘late modernism’ or ‘postmodernism’. Instead of definitively re-categorizing Beckett under any of these labels, the essays use his diverse oeuvre – encompassing poetry, criticism, prose, theatre, radio and film – as a case study to investigate and reassess the concept of ‘modernism after postmodernism’ in all its complexity, covering a broad range of topics spanning Beckett’s entire career. In addition to more thematic essays about art, history, politics, psychology and philosophy, the collection places his work in relation to that of other modernists such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, as well as to the literary canon in general. It represents an important contribution to both Beckett studies and modernism studies.

Falsifying Beckett

Falsifying Beckett
Author: Matthew Feldman
Publisher: Ibidem Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2015
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9783838207063

The dozen essays brought together here, alongside a newly-written introduction, contextualize and exemplify the recent 'empirical turn' in Beckett studies. Characterized, above all, by recourse to manuscript materials in constructing revisionist interpretations, this approach has helped to transform the study of Samuel Beckett over the past generation. In addition to focusing upon Beckett's early immersion in philosophy and psychology, other chapters similarly analyze his later collaboration with the BBC through the lens of literary history. Falsifying Beckett thus offers new readings of Beckett by returning to his archive of notebooks, letters, and drafts. In reassessing key aspects of his development as one of the 20th century's leading artists, this collection is of interest to all students of Beckett's writing as well as 'historicist' scholars and critics of modernism more generally.

Beckett's Dantes

Beckett's Dantes
Author: Daniela Caselli
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2013-07-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1847796303

Beckett's Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism is the first study in English on the literary relation between Beckett and Dante. It is an innovative reading of Samuel Beckett and Dante's works and a critical engagement with contemporary theories of intertextuality. It is an informative intertextual reading of Beckett's work, detecting previously unknown quotations, allusions to, and parodies of Dante in Beckett's fiction and criticism. The volume interprets Dante in the original Italian (as it appears in Beckett), translating into English all Italian quotations. It benefits from a multilingual approach based on Beckett's published works in English and French, and on manuscripts (which use English, French, German and Italian). Through a close reading of Beckett's fiction and criticism, the book will argue that Dante is both assumed as an external source of literary and cultural authority in Beckett's work, and also participates in Beckett's texts' sceptical undermining of authority. Moreover, the book demonstrates that the many references to various 'Dantes' produce 'Mr Beckett' as the figure of the author responsible for such a remarkably interconnected oeuvre. The book is aimed at the scholarly communities interested in literatures in English, literary and critical theory, comparative literature and theory, French literature and theory and Italian studies. Its jargon-free style will also attract third-year or advanced undergraduate students, and postgraduate students, as well as those readers interested in the unusual relationship between one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and the medieval author who stands for the very idea of the Western canon.

Watt

Watt
Author: Samuel Beckett
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2009-06-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 080219835X

In prose possessed of the radically stripped-down beauty and ferocious wit that characterize his work, this early novel by Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett recounts the grotesque and improbable adventures of a fantastically logical Irish servant and his master. Watt is a beautifully executed black comedy that, at its core, is rooted in the powerful and terrifying vision that made Beckett one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

Dream of Fair to Middling Women

Dream of Fair to Middling Women
Author: Samuel Beckett
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2020-03-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0571358063

Beckett's first 'literary landmark' ( St Petersburg Times) is a wonderfully savoury introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author. Written in 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was struggling to make ends meet, the novel offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. When submitted to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous or too risky; it was only published posthumously in 1992. As the story begins, Belacqua - a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the little Alba - 'wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final "relapse into Dublin"' ( New Yorker). Youthfully exuberant and Joycean in tone, Dream is a work of extraordinary virtuosity.