Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel
Cambridge University Press, 11/5/2009
EAN 9780521113885, ISBN10: 0521113881
Hardcover, 246 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 0.7 cm
Language: English
Samuel Beckett has long been seen as a distinctly 'apolitical' and 'ahistorical' writer, but this reputation fails to do him justice. Placing Beckett's novels in the context of the newly-liberated Irish Free State, Patrick Bixby explores for the first time their confrontation with the legacies of both Irish nationalism and British imperialism. In doing so, he reveals Beckett's fiction as a remarkable example of how postcolonial writing addresses the relationships between private consciousness and public life, as well as those between the novel form and a cultural environment including not only the literary tradition, but also political speeches, national monuments, and anthropological studies. With special attention to these relationships, the study demonstrates Beckett's challenge to familiar narratives of personal identity and communal belonging, which makes his writing integral to understanding the history of the novel and the fate of modernism, in addition to the emergence of postcolonial literature.
Introduction
Beckett, Ireland, and the postcolonial novel
1. Beckett's book of youth
juvenility and the nation in Dream of Fair to Middling Women
2. Murphy abroad
postcolonial dislocation, the national imaginary, and the 'unhomely'
3. Watt kind of man are you? Anthropology, authenticity, and Ireland
4. Narrating the no-man's-land
deterritorializing Ireland and postcolonial identity in the Trilogy
Index.