The world fame of Samuel Beckett is due to a combination of high academic esteem and immense popularity. An innovator in prose fiction to rival Joyce, his plays have been the most influential in modern theatre history. As an author in both English and French and a writer for the page and the stage, Beckett has been the focus for specialist treatment in each of his many guises, but there have been few attempts to provide a conspectus view. This book, first published in 1994, provides thirte...

Originally published in 1981. This book looks at the autobiographical work of nine twentieth-century writers – Henry Adams, Henry James, W. B. Yeats, Boris Pasternak, Leiris, Jean-Paul Sartre, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Green and Adrian Stokes. The author argues that often the writer has shaped his life through his craft, coming to understand the pattern of his own existence through the formalism of language. In each case the writer stamps his personality on the work by mean of a distinctive ...

When Samuel Beckett’s work first appeared, it was routinely described, by Adorno amongst others, as a clear example of European high culture. However, this judgement ignored an aspect of Beckett’s work and its reception that is, arguably, not yet fully understood; the intimate relation between his work and popular culture. Beckett used popular cultural forms; but popular culture has also found a place both for the work and for the man. This collection of essays examines how popular cultura...

Includes the essay "Notes on Camp," the inspiration for the 2019 exhibition Notes on Fashion: Camp at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of ArtAgainst Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the groundbreaking essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as...

Sartre's powerful political passions were united with a memorable literary gift, placing him foremost among the novelists, as well as the philosophers, of our time. Iris Murdoch's pioneering study analyses and evaluates the different strands of Sartre's rich and complex oeurve. Combining the objectivity of the scholar with a profound interest in contemporary problems, Iris Murdoch discusses the tradition of philosophical, political and aesthetic thought that gives historical authenticity t...

In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understan...

The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical l...

Understand Existentialism breaks down a complex mode of thought into more manageable sections, enabling you to get to grips with the key concepts within the movement. Chart the origins and development of existentialism in a variety of disciplines and learn about significant thinkers from Sartre and De Beauvoir to Beckett and Camus. Whether you are a newcomer or more experienced student, this book will enhance your understanding of a brand of philosophy designed to give meaning and directio...

This groundbreaking study of the work and legacy of Virginia Woolf is also an account of the intertwined lives of two extraordinary women.In 1932, Ruth Gruber earned her PhD—the youngest person ever to do so—with a stunning doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf. Published in 1935, the paper was the first-ever feminist critique of Woolf's work and inspired a series of correspondences between the two writers. It also led to Gruber's eventual meeting with Woolf, whi...

The evolution and manipulation of language from the celebrated author of After Babel. "A keenly discriminating literary mind at work on what it loves" ( The New York Times Book Review).Language and Silence is a book about language—and politics, meaning, silence, and the future of literature. Originally published between 1958 and 1966, the essays that make up this collection ponder whether we have passed out of an era of verbal primacy and ...

An education in a portmanteau: George Steiner at The New Yorker collects his best work from his more than 150 pieces for the magazine.Between 1967 and 1997, George Steiner wrote more than 130 pieces on a great range of topics for The New Yorker, making new books, difficult ideas, and unfamiliar subjects seem compelling not only to intellectuals but to “the common reader.” He possesses a famously dazzling mind: paganism, the Dutch Renaissance, chil...