Beckett Matters: Essays on Beckett’s Late Modernism

Collects Stan Gontarski’s finest essays on the work of Samuel Beckett over a forty-year period

Representing a profound engagement with the work of Samuel Beckett, this volume gathers the very best of Stan Gontarski’s Beckett criticism on practical, theoretical and critical levels. Such a range suggests a multiplicity of approaches to a body of work itself multiple, produced by an artist who underwent any number of transformations and reinventions over his long writing career.　Many of the essays collected here explore Beckett’s debt to his age, Beckett very much a product of a culture in transition, which change he would help foster. But much of Beckett’s creative struggle was to find a new way, his own way.　Most of the essays that comprise this volume detail that struggle, toward a way we now call Beckettian.

Key Features

• Includes 24 original essays divided into thematic sections: modernism, theory, editing, introducing, and performing and covers Beckett’s drama, staging, fiction, poetry and prose
• Unique collection of Beckett scholarship by a leading Beckett critic and theatre director brought together for the first time
• New introductory essay reflecting on the development of Beckett scholarship

About the Author

S. E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University, Ph.D., Ohio State (1974) and specializes in twentieth-century Irish Studies, in British, U.S., and European Modernism, and in performance theory. He has been awarded four National Endowment for the Humanities research grants, has twice been awarded Fulbright Professorships, has been Guest Editor of the following: American Book Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Modern Fiction Studies and most recently Drammaturgia. He is also General Editor of three book series: 1) “Crosscurrents: Comparative Studies in European Literature and Philosophy” with the University Press of Florida and 2) Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance with Anthem Press, London; and 3) (with Paul Ardoin and Laci Mattison) Understanding Philosophy / Understanding Modernism with Bloomsbury. He edited the Journal of Beckett Studies from 1989-2008, and currently serves as Co-Editor with its publication by Edinburgh University Press.

Beckett Matters is available from Edinburgh University Press.