The Journal of Beckett Studies has invited submissions in the form of a 300 word abstract for a special issue titled Beckett and Travel scheduled for publication in April 2027 as issue 36:1.
Samuel Beckett was for all his life an inveterate traveller. Early travels to France, Florence and Kassel in the 1920s were followed by a restless decade, the 1930s, during which he lived in Dublin, London and Paris, and spent six months in Germany (1936-37). Having settled in Paris in late 1937, he continued to travel widely, whether for work or on holiday, taking in – and this is not an exhaustive list – Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Portugal, Malta, Tunisia, Morocco, Yugoslavia, the USA. Emile Morin, for example, showed the way in which we might ‘destabilise and expand the coordinates commonly used when thinking about Beckett as a postcolonial writer, by documenting his stays in Tunisia and Morocco between 1969 and 1981’.
At the same time, Beckett’s protagonists and characters are often travellers, roaming across various distances (real and imagined). Whether this is Dan Rooney’s train journey in Dublin, Watt’s journey to Knott’s house, or the various locales visited by Mercier and Camier, or the journeys undertaken by the protagonists of the three novels, the muddy travel undertaken by the narrator of How It Is, or the projected journey envisaged by the narrator of Stirrings Still, travel is omnipresent in Beckett’s oeuvre. We have characters who are flaneurs, and we have characters who are homeless drifters – in each case, movement is a key feature of their lives. At the same time, Beckett counterpoints this with stasis, from Belacqua to the figures in the urns in Play.
So here are the co-ordinates for this special issue:
1 September 2026: Deadline for submission of abstracts (300 words with brief bio) to both Mark Nixon (m.nixon@reading.ac.uk) and Dirk Van Hulle (dirk.vanhulle@uantwerpen.be)
14 September 2026: Decision on accepted papers released
1 November 2026: Submission of accepted papers (6,000 to 8,000 words)
All papers will subsequently be sent out for peer review.
The Samuel Beckett Society 