Call for Papers for Proposed Edited Volume: Samuel Beckett and the 21st Century Novel

A call for papers has been issued by ibidem-verlag’s ‘Samuel Beckett in Company’ series editor, Paul Stewart, Professor of Literature, University of Nicosia, for a proposed edited volume with the title Samuel Beckett and the 21st Century Novel.

Professor Stewart writes:

‘Beckett’s influence on an older generation of novelists, such as Coetzee, Banville, Auster and others, has been addressed to some degree over recent years. The present volume seeks to map out Beckett’s influence on, or presence in, works arising since the beginning of the Millennium and so extend a nascent sense of Beckett’s on-going legacy within prose fiction. The volume will be comprised of approximately a dozen essays in English that address the topic from a variety of methodologies, locations, literary traditions and theoretical perspectives. Papers that address the influence on authors whose language of composition is not English or French are particularly welcome’.

Contributors might wish to consider, but are in no way confined by, the following:

• The influence, or presence, of Beckett in a single author’s work (e.g., ‘Beckett and Anna Burns’)
• How does Beckett’s reputation (as figured in academia and/or popular culture) mediate his reception and use by 21^st Century authors?
• How does the local reception of Beckett affect the subsequent literary response?
• Cross-media influence (i.e. how Beckett’s plays or poetry might have influenced subsequent fiction).
• Pastiche and/or parody of Beckett.
• The aesthetic of lessness and minimalism and subsequent literary reactions and uses.
• The use of Beckett in establishing character or cultural milieu.
• Beckettian thematics and aesthetics within contemporary mores (social, technological, economic, political, ecological).
• The on-going possibility or impossibility of fiction in the 21^st Century.

Abstract proposals of 300 words, with an accompanying short biography, should be sent as a Word attachment to stewartp@me.com by April 30 2022. The selected abstracts will then form the overall proposal to the Ibidem ‘Beckett in Company’ Series to receive approval and suggestions from the editorial board of the series, which is in the process of becoming SCOPUS indexed. Full articles of approximately 6000 words will then be requested for submission, with a deadline to be announced. The editor reserves the right to only make a final acceptance of a contribution once the full article has been reviewed.

Headline image: From ‘‘The Youth Need to see Their Greatness Reflected in our Eyes’ by Joe Caslin, Trinity College Dublin, 2019. [Pic: F Ó Faoláin]