This book is the first sustained examination of Samuel Beckett’s pivotal engagements with post-war BBC radio. The BBC acted as a key interpreter and promoter of Beckett’s work during this crucial period of his "getting known" in the Anglophone world in the 1950s and 1960s, especially through the culturally ambitious Third Programme, but also by the intermediary of the house magazine, The Listener. The BBC ensured a sizeable but also informed reception for Beckett’s radio plays and various ...

Published in association with the seminar series of the same name held by the University of Oxford, Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies presents the best new scholarship addressing the sources, development and ongoing influence of Samuel Beckett's work. Edited by convenors Dr Peter Fifield and Dr David Addyman, the volume presents ten research essays by leading international scholars ranging across Beckett's work, opening up new avenues of enquiry and association for scholars, stud...

This collection of essays, most of which return to or renew something of an empirical or archival approach to the issues, represents the most comprehensive analysis of Beckett's relationship to philosophy in print, how philosophical issues, conundrums, and themes play out amid narrative intricacies. The volume is thus both an astonishingly comprehensive overview and a series of detailed readings of the intersection between philosophical texts and Samuel Beckett's oeuvre, offered by a plura...

That both autobiography and biography have acquired a position of unprecedented importance over the past 30 years is now obvious. Less obvious are the reasons for this phenomenon. Theorists and students of AutoBiography, a research subject now viewed as respectable in academic circles, have recently mapped the contours and shifting parameters of the autobiographical and the biographical processes, thereby contributing to the profile and stature of both.This collection brings theatr...

The life of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) has been the subject of exhaustive scholarship, yet by contrast Beckett himself was a spare, minimalist writer who deeply distrusted the techniques of biography. In this new, concise, critical account of Beckett’s life and work, Andrew Gibson seeks to remain faithful to the writer’s artistic aims, staying close to Beckett’s style of thought and work in his analysis of this supremely modern figure.Beckett’s Rockaby ends with a resoundi...

Radio Drama brings together the practical skills needed for radio drams, such as directing, writing and sound design, with media history and communication theory.Challenging the belief that sound drama is a 'blind medium', Radio Drama shows how experimentation in radio narrative has blurred the dividing line between fiction and reality in modern media. Using extracts from scripts and analysing radio broadcasts from America, Britain, Canada and Australia, the book e...

This volume brings together specially commissioned essays by some of the world's leading experts on the life and work of W. H. Auden, one of the major English-speaking poets of the twentieth century. The volume's contributors include a prize-winning poet, Auden's literary executor and editor, and his most recent, widely acclaimed biographer. It offers fresh perspectives on his work from Auden critics, alongside specialists from such diverse fields as drama, ecological and travel studies. I...

Modernist movements radically transformed the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary establishment, and their effects are still felt today. Modernism introduces and analyzes what amounted to nothing less than a literary and cultural revolution.In this fully updated, expanded, and revised third edition, charting modernism in its global and local contexts, Peter Childs:details the origins of modernism and the influence of thinkers such ...

This groundbreaking collection from scholars and artists on the legacy of Beckett in contemporary art provides readers with a unique view of this important writer for page, stage, and screen. The volume argues that Beckett is more than an influence on contemporary art—he is, in fact, a contemporary artist, working alongside artists across disciplines in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. The volume explores Beckett’s formal experiments in drama, prose, and other media as contemporary, parallel ...

Samuel Beckett is unique in literature. Born and educated in Ireland, he lived most of his life in Paris. His literary output was rendered in either English or French, and he often translated one to the other, but there is disagreement about the contents of his bilingual corpus. A Beckett Canon by renowned theater scholar Ruby Cohn offers an invaluable guide to the entire corpus, commenting on Beckett's work in its original language.Beginning in 1929 with Beckett's earlies...

The British television director Alan Clarke is primarily associated with the visceral social realism of such works as his banned borstal play Scum, and his study of football hooliganism, The Firm. This book uncovers the full range of his work from the mythic fantasy of Penda’s Fen, to the radical short film on terrorism, Elephant.Dave Rolinson uses original research to examine the development of Clarke’s career from the theatre and the ‘studio system’ of provocative television play...

In Vintage Living Texts teachers and students will find the essential guide to the works of Margaret Atwood. This guide will deal with her themes, genre and narrative technique, and a close reading of the texts will be accompanied with likely exam questions, and contexts and comparisons - as well as providing a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels.