Since Beckett Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism [Paperback]

Samuel Beckett is widely regarded as 'the last modernist', the writer in whose work the aesthetic principles which drove the modernist project dwindled and were finally exhausted. And yet despite this, it is striking that many of the most important contemporary writers, across the world, see their work as emerging from a Beckettian legacy. So whilst Beckett belongs, in one sense, to the end of the modernist period, in another sense he is the well spring from which the contemporary, in a wide array of guises, can be seen to emerge.
Since Beckett looks at a number of writers, in different national and political contexts, tracing the way in which Beckett's writing inhabits the contemporary, while at the same time reading back through Beckett to the modernist and proto-modernist forms he inherited. In reading Beckett against the contemporary in this way, Peter Boxall offers both a compelling re-reading of Beckett, and a powerful new analysis of contemporary culture.

Peter Boxall is a Reader in English at the University of Sussex, UK. His books include Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot , Endgame (Palgrave, 2000) Don Delillo: The Possibility of Fiction (Routledge, 2005) and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (Century, 2006).

Introduction: Since BeckettPART 1: BACK ROADS: BECKETT, BANVILLE AND IRELAND1. Edgeworth, Bowen, Beckett, Banville: A Minor Tradition2. Spectrality and Eclipse: Beckett and Banville3. Unknown Entity: Ireland and Europe in Beckett and BanvillePART 2: TUNE ACCORDINGLY: BECKETT, BERNHARD AND SEBALD4. Faint Clarity: Tuning in Beckett5. All Balls: Beckett, Bernhard and Correction6. A Quite Singular Clarity: Beckett, Bernhard, SebaldPART 3: HOW IT OUGHT TO BE: BECKETT, GLOBALIZATION AND UTOPIA7. From Joyce to Beckett: From National to Global8. Knowledge Within Bounds: Beckett, Globalization and the Limits of Perception9. Slow Man, Dangling Man, Falling Man: Beckett in the Ruins of the Future BibliographyIndex