This volume comprises ten essays challenging the dominant account of Samuel Beckett as a figure that cannot be read historically by drawing on new archival materials and situating his finished works in their historical context.

"The essays in this collection, individually and collectively, revitalize Beckett Studies with a fresh transfusion of new ideas.The authors successfully recuperate the Historical Beckett - an artist attuned to, engaged with, and indeed produced by his history." - Graley Herren, Associate Professor of English, Xavier University

Autorentext
SEÁN KENNEDY is Assistant Professor of English at St Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. KATHERINE WEISS is Assistant Professor of English at East Tennessee State University, USA.

Inhalt
Beckett in History, Memory, Archive; S.Kennedy & K.Weiss Between Gospel and Prohibition: Beckett in Nazi Germany 1936-1937; M.Nixon Beckett's 'Brilliant Obscurantics': Watt and the Problem of Propaganda; J.McNaughton 'Faintly Struggling Things': Trauma, Testimony and Inscrutable Life in Beckett's The Unnamable; A.Garrison Beckett's Theatre 'After Auschwitz'; J.Blackman Samuel Beckett, the Archive, and the Problem of History; R.Reginio Archives of the End: Embodied History in Beckett's Plays; J.Boulter 'Humanity in Ruins': The Historical Body in Beckett's Fiction; K.Weiss Does Beckett Studies Require a Subject? Mourning Ireland in the Texts for Nothing; S.Kennedy Writing Relics: Mapping the Composition History of Beckett's Endgame; D.Van Hulle 'Agnostic Quietism' and Samuel Beckett's Early Development; M.Feldman